Campaigning Deities: Justifying the ways of Satan

[Excerpt from Hierarchies in Hell and Leaderless Fight Clubs: Altruism, Narrative Interest, and the Adaptive Appeal of Bad Boys, my master’s thesis]

Milton believed Christianity more than worthy of a poetic canon in the tradition of the classical poets, and Paradise Lost represents his effort at establishing one. What his Christian epic has offered for many readers over the centuries, however, is an invitation to weigh the actions and motivations of immortals in mortal terms. In the story, God becomes a human king, albeit one with superhuman powers, while Satan becomes an upstart subject. As Milton attempts to “justify the ways of God to Man,” he is taking it upon himself simultaneously, and inadvertently, to justify the absolute dominion of a human dictator. One of the consequences of this shift in perspective is the transformation of a philosophical tradition devoted to parsing the logic of biblical teachings into something akin to a political campaign between two rival leaders, each laying out his respective platform alongside a case against his rival. What was hitherto recondite and academic becomes in Milton’s work immediate and visceral.

Keats famously penned the wonderfully self-proving postulate, “Axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulses,” which leaves open the question of how an axiom might be so proved. Milton’s God responds to Satan’s approach to Earth, and his foreknowledge of Satan’s success in tempting the original pair, with a preemptive defense of his preordained punishment of Man:

…Whose fault?

Whose but his own? Ingrate! He had of Me

All he could have. I made him just and right,

Sufficient to have stood though free to fall.

Such I created all th’ ethereal pow’rs

And spirits, both them who stood and who failed:

Freely they stood who stood and fell who fell.

Not free, what proof could they have giv’n sincere

Of true allegiance, constant faith or love

Where only what they needs must do appeared,

Not what they would? What praise could they receive?

What pleasure I from such obedience paid

When will and reason… had served necessity,

Not me? (3.96-111)

God is defending himself against the charge that his foreknowledge of the fall implies that Man’s decision to disobey was borne of something other than his free will. What choice could there have been if the outcome of Satan’s temptation was predetermined? If it wasn’t predetermined, how could God know what the outcome would be in advance? God’s answer—of course I granted humans free will because otherwise their obedience would mean nothing—only introduces further doubt. Now we must wonder why God cherishes Man’s obedience so fervently. Is God hungry for political power? If we conclude he is—and that conclusion seems eminently warranted—then we find ourselves on the side of Satan. It’s not so much God’s foreknowledge of Man’s fall that undermines human freedom; it’s God’s insistence on our obedience, under threat of God’s terrible punishment.

Milton faces a still greater challenge in his attempt to justify God’s ways “upon our pulses” when it comes to the fallout of Man’s original act of disobedience. The Son argues on behalf of Man, pointing out that the original sin was brought about through temptation. If God responds by turning against Man, then Satan wins. The Son thus argues that God must do something to thwart Satan: “Or shall the Adversary thus obtain/ His end and frustrate Thine?” (3.156-7). Before laying out his plan for Man’s redemption, God explains why punishment is necessary:

…Man disobeying

Disloyal breaks his fealty and sins

Against the high supremacy of Heav’n,

Affecting godhead, and so, losing all,

To expiate his treason hath naught left

But to destruction sacred and devote

He with his whole posterity must die. (3. 203-9)

The potential contradiction between foreknowledge and free choice may be abstruse enough for Milton’s character to convincingly discount: “If I foreknew/ Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault/ Which had no less proved certain unforeknown” (3.116-9). There is another contradiction, however, that Milton neglects to take on. If Man is “Sufficient to have stood though free to fall,” then God must justify his decision to punish the “whole posterity” as opposed to the individuals who choose to disobey. The Son agrees to redeem all of humanity for the offense committed by the original pair. His knowledge that every last human will disobey may not be logically incompatible with their freedom to choose; if every last human does disobey, however, the case for that freedom is severely undermined. The axiom of collective guilt precludes the axiom of freedom of choice both logically and upon our pulses.

In characterizing disobedience as a sin worthy of severe punishment—banishment from paradise, shame, toil, death—an offense he can generously expiate for Man by sacrificing the (his) Son, God seems to be justifying his dominion by pronouncing disobedience to him evil, allowing him to claim that Man’s evil made it necessary for him to suffer a profound loss, the death of his offspring. In place of a justification for his rule, then, God resorts to a simple guilt trip.

Man shall not quite be lost but saved who will,

Yet not of will in him but grace in me

Freely vouchsafed. Once more I will renew

His lapsed pow’rs though forfeit and enthralled

By sin to foul exorbitant desires.

Upheld by me, yet once more he shall stand

On even ground against his mortal foe,

By me upheld that he may know how frail

His fall’n condition is and to me owe

All his deliv’rance, and to none but me. (3.173-83)

Having decided to take on the burden of repairing the damage wrought by Man’s disobedience to him, God explains his plan:

Die he or justice must, unless for him

Some other as able and as willing pay

The rigid satisfaction, death for death. (3.210-3)

He then asks for a volunteer. In an echo of an earlier episode in the poem which has Satan asking for a volunteer to leave hell on a mission of exploration, there is a moment of hesitation before the Son offers himself up to die on Man’s behalf.

…On Me let thine anger fall.

Account Me Man. I for his sake will leave

Thy bosom and this glory next to Thee

Freely put off and for him lastly die

Well pleased. On Me let Death wreck all his rage! (3.37-42)

This great sacrifice, which is supposed to be the basis of the Son’s privileged status over the angels, is immediately undermined because he knows he won’t stay dead for long: “Yet that debt paid/ Thou wilt not leave me in the loathsome grave” (246-7). The Son will only die momentarily. This sacrifice doesn’t stack up well against the real risks and sacrifices made by Satan.

All the poetry about obedience and freedom and debt never takes on the central question Satan’s rebellion forces readers to ponder: Does God deserve our obedience? Or are the labels of good and evil applied arbitrarily? The original pair was forbidden from eating from the Tree of Knowledge—could they possibly have been right to contravene the interdiction? Since it is God being discussed, however, the assumption that his dominion requires no justification, that it is instead simply in the nature of things, might prevail among some readers, as it does for the angels who refuse to join Satan’s rebellion. The angels, after all, owe their very existence to God, as Abdiel insists to Satan. Who, then, are any of them to question his authority? This argument sets the stage for Satan’s remarkable rebuttal:

…Strange point and new!

Doctrine which we would know whence learnt: who saw

When this creation was? Remember’st thou

Thy making while the Maker gave thee being?

We know no time when we were not as now,

Know none before us, self-begot, self-raised

By our own quick’ning power…

Our puissance is our own. Our own right hand

Shall teach us highest deeds by proof to try

Who is our equal. (5.855-66)

Just as a pharaoh could claim credit for all the monuments and infrastructure he had commissioned the construction of, any king or dictator might try to convince his subjects that his deeds far exceed what he is truly capable of. If there’s no record and no witness—or if the records have been doctored and the witnesses silenced—the subjects have to take the king’s word for it.

That God’s dominion depends on some natural order, which he himself presumably put in place, makes his tendency to protect knowledge deeply suspicious. Even the angels ultimately have to take God’s claims to have created the universe and them along with it solely on faith. Because that same unquestioning faith is precisely what Satan and the readers of Paradise Lost are seeking a justification for, they could be forgiven for finding the answer tautological and unsatisfying. It is the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil that Adam and Eve are forbidden to eat fruit from. When Adam, after hearing Raphael’s recounting of the war in heaven, asks the angel how the earth was created, he does receive an answer, but only after a suspicious preamble:

…such commission from above

I have received to answer thy desire

Of knowledge with bounds. Beyond abstain

To ask nor let thine own inventions hope

Things not revealed which the invisible King

Only omniscient hath suppressed in night,

To none communicable in Earth or Heaven:

Enough is left besides to search and know. (7.118-125)

Raphael goes on to compare knowledge to food, suggesting that excessively indulging curiosity is unhealthy. This proscription of knowledge reminded Shelley of the Prometheus myth. It might remind modern readers of The Wizard of Oz—“Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain”—or to the space monkeys in Fight Club, who repeatedly remind us that “The first rule of Project Mayhem is, you do not ask questions.” It may also resonate with news about dictators in Asia or the Middle East trying to desperately to keep social media outlets from spreading word of their atrocities.

Like the protesters of the Arab Spring, Satan is putting himself at great risk by challenging God’s authority. If God’s dominion over Man and the angels is evidence not of his benevolence but of his supreme selfishness, then Satan’s rebellion becomes an attempt at altruistic punishment. The extrapolation from economic experiments like the ultimatum and dictator games to efforts to topple dictators may seem like a stretch, especially if humans are predisposed to forming and accepting positions in hierarchies, as a casual survey of virtually any modern organization suggests is the case.

Organized institutions, however, are a recent development in terms of human evolution. The English missionary Lucas Bridges wrote about his experiences with the Ona foragers in Tierra del Fuego in his 1948 book Uttermost Part of the Earth, and he expresses his amusement at his fellow outsiders’ befuddlement when they learn about the Ona’s political dynamics:

A certain scientist visited our part of the world and, in answer to his inquiries on this matter, I told him that the Ona had no chieftains, as we understand the word. Seeing that he did not believe me, I summoned Kankoat, who by that time spoke some Spanish. When the visitor repeated his question, Kankoat, too polite to answer in the negative, said: “Yes, senor, we, the Ona, have many chiefs. The men are all captains and all the women are sailors” (quoted in Boehm 62).

At least among Ona men, it seems there was no clear hierarchy. The anthropologist Richard Lee discovered a similar dynamic operating among the !Kung foragers of the Kalahari. In order to ensure that no one in the group can attain an elevated status which would allow him to dominate the others, several leveling mechanisms are in place. Lee quotes one of his informants:

When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this. We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. In this way we cool his heart and make him gentle. (quoted in Boehm 45)

These examples of egalitarianism among nomadic foragers are part of anthropologist Christopher Boehm’s survey of every known group of hunter-gatherers. His central finding is that “A distinctively egalitarian political style is highly predictable wherever people live in small, locally autonomous social and economic groups” (35-36). This finding bears on any discussion of human evolution and human nature because small groups like these constituted the whole of humanity for all but what amounts to the final instants of geological time.

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THE PEOPLE WHO EVOLVED OUR GENES FOR US: CHRISTOPHER BOEHM ON MORAL ORIGINS – PART 3 OF A CRASH COURSE IN MULTILEVEL SELECTION THEORY

Seduced by Satan

[Excerpt from Hierarchies in Hell and Leaderless Fight Clubs: Altruism, Narrative Interest, and the Adaptive Appeal of Bad Boys, my master’s thesis]

Why do we like the guys who seem not to care whether or not what they’re doing is right, but who often manage to do what’s right anyway? In the Star Wars series, Han Solo is introduced as a mercenary, concerned only with monetary reward. In the first episode of Mad Men, audiences see Don Draper saying to a woman that they should get married, and then in the final scene he arrives home to his actual wife. Tony Soprano, Jack Sparrow, Tom Sawyer, the list of male characters who flout rules and conventions, who lie, cheat and steal, but who nevertheless compel the attention, the favor, even the love of readers and moviegoers would be difficult to exhaust.

John Milton has been accused of both betraying his own and inspiring others' sympathy and admiration for what should be the most detestable character imaginable. When he has Satan, in Paradise Lost, say, “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” many believed he was signaling his support of the king of England’s overthrow. Regicidal politics are well and good—at least from the remove of many generations—but voicing your opinions through such a disreputable mouthpiece? That’s difficult to defend. Imagine using a fictional Hitler to convey your stance on the current president.

Stanley Fish theorizes that Milton’s game was a much subtler one: he didn’t intend for Satan to be sympathetic so much as seductive, so that in being persuaded and won over to him readers would be falling prey to the same temptation that brought about the fall. As humans, all our hearts are marked with original sin. So if many readers of Milton’s magnum opus come away thinking Satan may have been in the right all along, the failure wasn’t the author’s unconstrained admiration for the rebel angel so much as it was his inability to adequately “justify the ways of God to men.” God’s ways may follow a certain logic, but the appeal of Satan’s ways is deeper, more primal.

In the “Argument,” or summary, prefacing Book Three, Milton relays some of God’s logic: “Man hath offended the majesty of God by aspiring to godhead and therefore, with all his progeny devoted to death, must die unless someone can be found sufficient to answer for his offence and undergo his punishment.” The Son volunteers. This reasoning has been justly characterized as “barking mad” by Richard Dawkins. But the lines give us an important insight into what Milton saw as the principle failing of the human race, their ambition to be godlike. It is this ambition which allows us to sympathize with Satan, who incited his fellow angels to rebellion against the rule of God.

In Book Five, we learn that what provoked Satan to rebellion was God’s arbitrary promotion of his own Son to a status higher than the angels: “by Decree/ Another now hath to himself ingross’t/ All Power, and us eclipst under the name/ Of King anointed.” Citing these lines, William Flesch explains, “Satan’s grandeur, even if it is the grandeur of archangel ruined, comes from his iconoclasm, from his desire for liberty.” At the same time, however, Flesch insists that, “Satan’s revolt is not against tyranny. It is against a tyrant whose place he wishes to usurp.” So, it’s not so much freedom from domination he wants, according to Flesch, as the power to dominate.

Anthropologist Christopher Boehm describes the political dynamics of nomadic peoples in his book Hierarchy in the Forest: TheEvolution of Egalitarian Behavior, and his descriptions suggest that parsing a motive of domination from one of preserving autonomy is much more complicated than Flesch’s analysis assumes. “In my opinion,” Boehm writes, “nomadic foragers are universally—and all but obsessively—concerned with being free from the authority of others” (68). As long as the group they belong to is small enough for each group member to monitor the actions of the others, people can maintain strict egalitarianism, giving up whatever dominance they may desire for the assurance of not being dominated themselves.

Satan very likely speaks to this natural ambivalence in humans. Benevolent leaders win our love and admiration through their selflessness and charisma. But no one wants to be a slave. Does Satan’s admirable resistance and defiance shade into narcissistic self-aggrandizement and an unchecked will to power? If so, is his tyranny any more savage than that of God? And might there even be something not altogether off-putting about a certain degree self-indulgent badness?

Also read:

CAMPAIGNING DEITIES: JUSTIFYING THE WAYS OF SATAN

THE ADAPTIVE APPEAL OF BAD BOYS

SYMPATHIZING WITH PSYCHOS: WHY WE WANT TO SEE ALEX ESCAPE HIS FATE AS A CLOCKWORK ORANGE

T.J. Eckleburg Sees Everything: The Great God-Gap in Gatsby part 2 of 2

Read part 1

Though The Great Gatsby does indeed tell a story of punishment, readers are left with severe doubts as to whether those who receive punishment actually deserve it. Gatsby is involved in criminal activities, and he has an affair with a married woman. Myrtle likewise is guilty of adultery. But does either deserve to die? What about George Wilson? His is the only attempt in the novel at altruistic punishment. So natural is his impulse toward revenge, however, and so given are readers to take that impulse for granted, that its function in preserving a broader norm of cooperation requires explanation. Flesch describes a series of experiments in the field of game theory centering on an exchange called the ultimatum game. One participant is given a sum of money and told he or she must propose a split with a second participant, with the proviso that if the second person rejects the cut neither will get to keep anything. Flesch points out, however, that

It is irrational for the responder not to accept any proposed split from the proposer. The responder will always come out better by accepting than by vetoing. And yet people generally veto offers of less than 25 percent of the original sum. This means they are paying to punish. They are giving up a sure gain in order to punish the selfishness of the proposer. (31)

To understand why George’s attempt at revenge is altruistic, consider that he had nothing to gain, from a purely selfish and rational perspective, and much to lose by killing the man he believed killed his wife. He was risking physical harm if a fight ensued. He was risking arrest for murder. Yet if he failed to seek revenge readers would likely see him as somehow less than human. His quest for justice, as futile and misguided as it is, would likely endear him to readers—if the discovery of how futile and misguided it was didn’t precede their knowledge of it taking place. Readers, in fact, would probably respond more favorably toward George than any other character in the story, including the narrator. But the author deliberately prevents this outcome from occurring.

The simple explanation for Fitzgerald’s decision not to gratify his readers but rather to disappoint and disturb them is that he wanted his novel to serve as an indictment of the types of behavior that are encouraged by the social conditions he describes in the story, conditions which would have been easily recognizable to many readers of his day and which persist into the Twenty-First Century. Though the narrator plays the role of second-order free-rider, the author clearly signals his own readiness to punish by publishing his narrative about such bad behavior perpetrated by characters belonging to a particular group of people, a group corresponding to one readers might encounter outside the realm of fiction.

Fitzgerald makes it obvious in the novel that beyond Tom’s simple contempt for George there exist several more severe impediments to what biologists would call group cohesion but that most readers would simply refer to as a sense of community. The idea of a community as a unified entity whose interests supersede those of the individuals who make it up is something biological anthropologists theorize religion evolved to encourage. In his book Darwin’s Cathedral, in which he attempts to explain religion in terms of group selection theory, David Sloan Wilson writes:

A group of people who abandon self-will and work tirelessly for a greater good will fare very well as a group, much better than if they all pursue their private utilities, as long as the greater good corresponds to the welfare of the group. And religions almost invariably do link the greater good to the welfare of the community of believers, whether an organized modern church or an ethnic group for whom religion is thoroughly intermixed with the rest of their culture. Since religion is such an ancient feature of our species, I have no problem whatsoever imagining the capacity for selflessness and longing to be part of something larger than ourselves as part of our genetic and cultural heritage. (175)

One of the main tasks religious beliefs evolved to handle would have been addressing the same “free-rider problem” William Flesch discovers at the heart of narrative. What religion offers beyond the social monitoring of group members is the presence of invisible beings whose concerns are tied to the collective concerns of the group.

Obviously, Tom Buchanan’s sense of community has clear demarcations. “Civilization is going to pieces,” he warns Nick as prelude to his recommendation of a book titled “The Rise of the Coloured Empires.” “The idea,” Tom explains, “is that if we don’t look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged” (17). “We’ve got to beat them down,” Daisy helpfully, mockingly chimes in (18). While this animosity toward members of other races seems immoral at first glance, in the social context the Buchanans inhabit it actually represents a concern for the broader group, “the white race.” But Tom’s animosity isn’t limited to other races. What prompts Catherine to tell Nick how her sister “can’t stand” her husband during the gathering in Tom and Myrtle’s apartment is in fact Tom’s ridiculing of George. In response to another character’s suggestion that he’d like to take some photographs of people in Long Island “if I could get the entry,” Tom jokingly insists to Myrtle that she should introduce the man to her husband. Laughing at his own joke, Tom imagines a title for one of the photographs: “‘George B. Wilson at the Gasoline Pump,’ or something like that” (37). Disturbingly, Tom’s contempt for George based on his lowly social status has contaminated Myrtle as well. Asked by her sister why she married George in the first place, she responds, “I married him because I thought he was a gentleman…I thought he knew something about breeding but he wasn’t fit to lick my shoe” (39). Her sense of superiority, however, is based on the artificial plan for her and Tom to get married.

That Tom’s idea of who belongs to his own superior community is determined more by “breeding” than by economic success—i.e. by birth and not accomplishment—is evidenced by his attitude toward Gatsby. In a scene that has Tom stopping with two friends, a husband and wife, at Gatsby’s mansion while riding horses, he is shocked when Gatsby shows an inclination to accept an invitation to supper extended by the woman, who is quite drunk. Both the husband and Tom show their disapproval. “My God,” Tom says to Nick, “I believe the man’s coming…Doesn’t he know she doesn’t want him?” (109). When Nick points out that woman just said she did want him, Tom answers, “he won’t know a soul there.” Gatsby’s statement in the same scene that he knows Tom’s wife provokes him, as soon as Gatsby has left the room, to say, “By God, I may be old-fashioned in my ideas but women run around too much these days to suit me. They meet all kinds of crazy fish” (110). In a later scene that has Tom accompanying Daisy, with Nick in tow, to one of Gatsby’s parties, he asks, “Who is this Gatsby anyhow?... Some big bootlegger?” When Nick says he’s not, Tom says, “Well, he certainly must have strained himself to get this menagerie together” (114). Even when Tom discovers that Gatsby and Daisy are having an affair, he still doesn’t take Gatsby seriously. He calls Gatsby “Mr. Nobody from Nowhere” (137), and says, “I’ll be damned if I see how you got within a mile of her unless you brought the groceries to the back door” (138). Once he’s succeeded in scaring Daisy with suggestions of Gatsby’s criminal endeavors, Tom insists the two drive home together, saying, “I think he realizes that his presumptuous little flirtation is over” (142).

When George Wilson looks to the eyes of Dr. Eckleburg in supplication after that very car ride leads to Myrtle’s death, the fact that this “God” is an advertisement, a supplication in its own right to viewers on behalf of the optometrist to boost his business, symbolically implicates the substitution of markets for religion—or a sense of common interest—as the main factor behind Tom’s superciliously careless sense of privilege. The eyes seem such a natural stand-in for an absent God that it’s easy to take the symbolic logic for granted without wondering why George might mistake them as belonging to some sentient agent. Evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering takes on that very question in The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life, where he cites research suggesting that “attributing moral responsibility to God is a sort of residual spillover from our everyday social psychology dealing with other people” (138). Bering theorizes that humans’ tendency to assume agency behind even random physical events evolved as a by-product of our profound need to understand the motives and intentions of our fellow humans: “When the emotional climate is just right, there’s hardly a shape or form that ‘evidence’ cannot assume. Our minds make meaning by disambiguating the meaningless” (99). In place of meaningless events, humans see intentional signs.

According to Bering’s theory, George Wilson’s intense suffering would have made him desperate for some type of answer to the question of why such tragedy has befallen him. After discussing research showing that suffering, as defined by societal ills like infant mortality and violent crime, and “belief in God were highly correlated,” Bering suggests that thinking of hardship as purposeful, rather than random, helps people cope because it allows them to place what they’re going through in the context of some larger design (139). What he calls “the universal common denominator” to all the permutations of religious signs, omens, and symbols, is the same cognitive mechanism, “theory of mind,” that allows humans to understand each other and communicate so effectively as groups. “In analyzing things this way,” Bering writes,

we’re trying to get into God’s head—or the head of whichever culturally constructed supernatural agent we have on offer… This is to say, just like other people’s surface behaviors, natural events can be perceived by us human beings as being about something other than their surface characteristics only because our brains are equipped with the specialized cognitive software, theory of mind, that enables us to think about underlying psychological causes. (79)

So George, in his bereaved and enraged state, looks at a billboard of a pair of eyes and can’t help imagining a mind operating behind them, one whose identity he’s learned to associate with a figure whose main preoccupation is the judgment of individual humans’ moral standings. According to both David Sloan Wilson and Jesse Bering, though, the deity’s obsession with moral behavior is no coincidence.

Covering some of the same game theory territory as Flesch, Bering points out that the most immediate purpose to which we put our theory of mind capabilities is to figure out how altruistic or selfish the people around us are. He explains that

in general, morality is a matter of putting the group’s needs ahead of one’s own selfish interests. So when we hear about someone who has done the opposite, especially when it comes at another person’s obvious expense, this individual becomes marred by our social judgment and grist for the gossip mills. (183)

Having arisen as a by-product of our need to monitor and understand the motives of other humans, religion would have been quickly co-opted in the service of solving the same free-rider problem Flesch finds at the heart of narratives. Alongside our concern for the reputations of others is a close guarding of our own reputations. Since humans are given to assuming agency is involved even in random events like shifts in weather, group cohesion could easily have been optimized with the subtlest suggestion that hidden agents engage in the same type of monitoring as other, fully human members of the group. Bering writes:

For many, God represents that ineradicable sense of being watched that so often flares up in moments of temptation—He who knows what’s in our hearts, that private audience that wants us to act in certain ways at critical decision-making points and that will be disappointed in us otherwise. (191)

Bering describes some of his own research that demonstrates this point. Coincident with the average age at which children begin to develop a theory of mind (around 4), they began responding to suggestions that they’re being watched by an invisible agent—named Princess Alice in honor of Bering’s mother—by more frequently resisting the temptation to avail themselves of opportunities to cheat that were built into the experimental design of a game they were asked to play (Piazza et al. 311-20). An experiment with adult participants, this time told that the ghost of a dead graduate student had been seen in the lab, showed the same results; when competing in a game for fifty dollars, they were much less likely to cheat than others who weren’t told the ghost story (Bering 193).

Bering also cites a study that has even more immediate relevance to George Wilson’s odd behavior vis-à-vis Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes. In “Cues of Being Watched Enhance Cooperation in a Real-World Setting,” the authors describe an experiment in which they tested the effects of various pictures placed near an “honesty box,” where people were supposed to be contributing money in exchange for milk and tea. What they found is that when the pictures featured human eyes more people contributed more money than when they featured abstract patterns of flowers. They theorize that

images of eyes motivate cooperative behavior because they induce a perception in participants of being watched. Although participants were not actually observed in either of our experimental conditions, the human perceptual system contains neurons that respond selectively to stimuli involving faces and eyes…, and it is therefore possible that the images exerted an automatic and unconscious effect on the participants’ perception that they were being watched. Our results therefore support the hypothesis that reputational concerns may be extremely powerful in motivating cooperative behavior. (2) (But also see Sparks et al. for failed replications)

This study also suggests that, while Fitzgerald may have meant the Dr. Eckleburg sign as a nod toward religion being supplanted by commerce, there is an alternate reading of the scene that focuses on the sign’s more direct impact on George Wilson. In several scenes throughout the novel, Wilson shows his willingness to acquiesce in the face of Tom’s bullying. Nick describes him as “spiritless” and “anemic” (29). It could be that when he says “God sees everything” he’s in fact addressing himself because he is tempted not to pursue justice—to let the crime go unpunished and thus be guilty himself of being a second-order free-rider. He doesn’t, after all, exert any great effort to find and kill Gatsby, and he kills himself immediately thereafter anyway.

Religion in Gatsby does, of course, go beyond some suggestive references to an empty placeholder. Nick ends the story with a reflection on how “Gatsby believed in the green light,” the light across the bay which he knew signaled Daisy’s presence in the mansion she lived in there. But for Gatsby it was also “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning—” (189). Earlier Nick had explained how Gatsby “talked a lot about the past and I gathered that he wanted to recover something, some idea of himself perhaps, that had gone into loving Daisy.” What that idea was becomes apparent in the scene describing Gatsby and Daisy’s first kiss, which occurred years prior to the events of the plot. “He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God… At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete” (117). In place of some mind in the sky, the design Americans are encouraged to live by is one they have created for themselves. Unfortunately, just as there is no mind behind the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg, the designs many people come up with for themselves are based on tragically faulty premises.

The replacement of religiously inspired moral principles with selfish economic and hierarchical calculations, which Dr. Eckleburg so perfectly represents, is what ultimately leads to all the disgraceful behavior Nick describes. He writes, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and people and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess” (188). Game theorist and behavioral economist Robert Frank, whose earlier work greatly influenced William Flesch’s theories of narrative, has recently written about how the same social dynamics Fitzgerald lamented are in place again today. In The Darwin Economy, he describes what he calls an “expenditure cascade”:

The explosive growth of CEO pay in recent decades, for example, has led many executives to build larger and larger mansions. But those mansions have long since passed the point at which greater absolute size yields additional utility… Top earners build bigger mansions simply because they have more money. The middle class shows little evidence of being offended by that. On the contrary, many seem drawn to photo essays and TV programs about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. But the larger mansions of the rich shift the frame of reference that defines acceptable housing for the near-rich, who travel in many of the same social circles… So the near-rich build bigger, too, and that shifts the relevant framework for others just below them, and so on, all the way down the income scale. By 2007, the median new single-family house built in the United States had an area of more than 2,300 square feet, some 50 percent more than its counterpart from 1970. (61-2)

How exactly people are straining themselves to afford these houses would be a fascinating topic for Fitzgerald’s successors. But one thing is already abundantly clear: it’s not the CEOs who are cleaning up the mess.

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T.J. Eckleburg Sees Everything: The Great God-Gap in Gatsby part 1 of 2

            When George Wilson, in one of the most disturbing scenes in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby, tells his neighbor that “God sees everything” while staring disconsolately at the weathered advertisement of some long-ago optometrist named T.J. Eckleburg, his longing for a transcendent authority who will mete out justice on his behalf pulls at the hearts of readers who realize his plea will go unheard. Anthropologists and psychologists studying the human capacity for cooperation and altruism are coming to view religion as an important factor in our evolution. Since the cooperative are always at risk of being exploited by the selfish, mechanisms to enforce altruism had to be in place for any tendency to behave for the benefit of others to evolve. The most basic of these mechanisms is a constant awareness of our own and our neighbors’ reputations. Humans, research has shown, are far more tempted to behave selfishly when they believe it won’t harm their reputations—i.e. when they believe no witnesses are present.

So profound is humans’ concern for their reputations that they can even be nudged toward altruistic behaviors by the mere suggestion of invisible witnesses or the simplest representation of watching eyes. The billboard featuring Dr. Eckleburg’s eyes, however, holds no sway over George’s wife Myrtle, or the man she has an affair with. That this man, Tom Buchanan, has such little concern for his reputation—or that he simply feels entitled to exploit Myrtle—serves as an indictment of the social and economic inequality in the America of Fitzgerald’s day, which carved society into hierarchically arranged echelons and exposed the have-nots to the careless depredations of the haves.

Nick Carraway, the narrator, begins the story by recounting a lesson he learned from his father as part of his Midwestern upbringing. “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” Nick’s father had told him, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had”(5). This piece of wisdom serves at least two purposes: it explains Nick’s self-proclaimed inclination to “reserve all judgments,” highlighting the severity of the wrongdoings which have prompted him to write the story; and it provides an ironic moral lens through which readers view the events of the plot. What is to be made, in light of Nick’s father’s reminder about unevenly parceled out advantages, of the crimes committed by wealthy characters like Tom and Daisy Buchanan?

The focus on morality notwithstanding, religion plays a scant, but surprising, role in The Great Gatsby. It first appears in a conversation between Nick and Catherine, the sister of Myrtle Wilson. Catherine explains to Nick that neither Tom nor Myrtle “can stand the person they’re married to” (37). To the obvious question of why they don’t simply leave their spouses, Catherine responds that it’s Daisy, Tom’s wife, who represents the sole obstacle to the lovers’ happiness. “She’s a Catholic,” Catherine says, “and they don’t believe in divorce” (38). However, Nick explains that “Daisy was not a Catholic,” and he goes on to admit, “I was a little shocked by the elaborateness of the lie.” The conversation takes place at a small gathering hosted by Tom and Myrtle in an apartment rented, it seems, for the sole purpose of giving the two a place to meet. Before Nick leaves the party, he witnesses an argument between the hosts over whether Myrtle has any right to utter Daisy’s name which culminates in Tom striking her and breaking her nose. Obviously, Tom doesn’t despise his wife as much as Myrtle does her husband. And the lie about Daisy’s religious compunctions serves simply to justify Tom’s refusal to leave her and facilitate his continued exploitation of Myrtle.

The only other scene in which a religious belief is asserted explicitly is the one featuring the conversation between George and his neighbor. It comes after Myrtle, whose dalliance had finally aroused her husband’s suspicion, has been struck by a car and killed. George, upon discovering that something had been going on behind his back, locked Myrtle in his garage, and it was when she escaped and ran out into the road to stop the car she thought Tom was driving that she got hit. As the dust from the accident settles—literally, since the garage and the stretch of road are situated in a “valley of ashes” created by the remnants of the coal powering the nearby city being dumped alongside the adjacent rail tracks—George is left alone with a fellow inhabitant of the valley, a man named Michaelis, who asks if he belongs to a church where there might a be a priest he can call to come comfort him. “Don’t belong to one,” George answers (165). He does, however, describe a religious belief of sorts to Michaelis. Having explained why he’d begun to suspect Myrtle was having an affair, George goes on to say, “I told her she might fool me but she couldn’t fool God. I took her to the window.” He walks to the window again as he’s telling the story to his neighbor. “I said, ‘God knows what you’ve been doing, everything you’ve been doing. You may fool me but you can’t fool God!’” (167). Michaelis, who is by now fearing for George’s sanity, notices something disturbing as he stands listening to this rant: “Standing behind him Michaelis saw with a shock that he was looking at the eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburg which had just emerged pale and enormous from the dissolving night” (167). When George speaks again, repeating, “God sees everything,” Michaelis feels compelled to assure him, “That’s an advertisement” (167). Though when George first expresses the sentiment, part declaration, part plea, he was clearly thinking of Myrtle’s crime against him, when he repeats it he seems to be thinking of the driver’s crime against Myrtle. God may have seen it, but George takes it upon himself to deliver the punishment.

George Wilson’s turning to God for some moral accounting, despite his general lack of religious devotion, mirrors Nick Carraway’s efforts to settle the question of culpability, despite his own professed reluctance to judge, through the telling of this tragic story. Nick learns from Gatsby that it was in fact Daisy, with whom Gatsby has been carrying on an affair, who was behind the wheel of the car that killed Myrtle. But Gatsby, who was in the passenger seat, assures him it was an accident, not revenge for the affair Myrtle was carrying on with Daisy’s husband. Yet when George finally leaves his garage and turns to Tom to find out who owns the car that killed his wife, assuming it is the same man his wife was cheating on him with, Tom informs him the car belongs to Gatsby, leaving out the crucial fact that Gatsby never met Myrtle. George goes to Gatsby’s mansion, finds him in his pool, shoots and kills him, and then turns the gun on himself. Three people end up dead, Myrtle, George, and Gatsby. Despite their clear complicity, though, Tom and Daisy experience nary a repercussion beyond the natural grief of losing their lovers. Insofar as Nick believes the Buchanans’ perfect getaway is an intolerable injustice, he must realize he holds the power to implicate them, to damage their reputations, by writing and publishing his account of the incidents leading up to the deaths.

Evolutionary critic William Flesch sees our human passion for narrative as a manifestation of our obsession with our own and our fellow humans’ reputations, which evolved at least in part to keep track of each other’s propensities for moral behavior. In Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, Flesch lays out his attempt at solving what he calls “the puzzle of narrative interest,” by which he means the question of why people feel “anxiety on behalf of and about the motives, actions, and experiences of fictional characters” (7). He finds the key to solving this puzzle in a concept called “strong reciprocity,” whereby “the strong reciprocator punishes and rewards others for their behavior toward any member of the social group, and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with the reciprocator” (22). An example of this phenomenon takes place in the novel when the guests at Gatsby’s parties gossip and ardently debate about which of the rumors circling their host are true—particularly of interest is the one saying that “he killed a man” (48). Flesch cites reports from experiments demonstrating that in uneven exchanges, participants with no stake in the outcome are actually willing to incur some cost to themselves in an effort to enforce fairness (31-5). He then goes on to give a compelling account of how this tendency goes a long way toward an explanation of our human fascination with storytelling.

Flesch’s theory of narrative interest begins with models of the evolution of cooperation. For the first groups of human ancestors to evolve cooperative or altruistic traits, they would have had to solve what biologists and game theorists call “the free-rider problem.” Flesch explains:

Darwin himself had proposed a way for altruism to evolve through a mechanism of group selection. Groups with altruists do better as a group than groups without. But it was shown in the 1960s that, in fact, such groups would be too easily infiltrated or invaded by nonaltruists—that is, that group boundaries were too porous—to make group selection strong enough to overcome competition at the level of the individual or the gene. (5)

Strong, or indirect reciprocity, coupled with a selfish concern for one’s own reputation, may have evolved as mechanisms to address this threat of exploitative non-cooperators. For instance, in order for Tom Buchanan to behave selfishly by sleeping with George Wilson’s wife, he had to calculate his chances of being discovered in the act and punished. Interestingly, after “exchanging a frown with Doctor Eckleburg” while speaking to Nick in an early scene in Wilson’s garage, Tom suggests his motives for stealing away with Myrtle are at least somewhat noble. “Terrible place,” he says of the garage and the valley of ashes. “It does her good to get away” (30). Nick, clearly uncomfortable with the position Tom has put him in, where he has to choose whether to object to Tom’s behavior or play the role of second-order free-rider himself, poses the obvious question: “Doesn’t her husband object?” To which Tom replies, “He’s so dumb he doesn’t know he’s alive” (30). Nick, inclined to reserve judgment, keeps Tom and Myrtle’s secret. Later in the novel, though, he keeps the same secret for Daisy and Gatsby.

What makes Flesch’s theory so compelling is that it sheds light on the roles played by everyone from the author, in this case Fitzgerald, to the readers, to the characters, whose nonexistence beyond the pages of the novel is little obstacle to their ability to arouse sympathy or ire. Just as humans are keen to ascertain the relative altruism of their neighbors, so too are they given to broadcasting signals of their own altruism. Flesch explains, “we track not only the original actor whose actions we wish to see reciprocated, whether through reward or more likely punishment; we track as well those who are in a position to track that actor, and we track as well those in a position to track those tracking the actor” (50). What this means is that even if the original “actor” is fictional, readers can signal their own altruism by becoming emotionally engaged in the outcome of the story, specifically by wanting to see altruistic characters rewarded and selfish characters punished.

Nick Carraway is tracking Tom Buchanan’s actions, for instance. Reading the novel, we have little doubt what Nick’s attitude toward Tom is, especially as the story progresses. Though we may favor Nick over Tom, Nick’s failure to sufficiently punish Tom when the degree of his selfishness first becomes apparent tempers any positive feelings we may have toward him. As Flesch points out, “altruism could not sustain an evolutionarily stable system without the contribution of altruistic punishers to punish the free-riders who would flourish in a population of purely benevolent altruists” (66).

On the other hand, through the very act of telling the story, the narrator may be attempting to rectify his earlier moral complacence. According to Flesch’s model of the dynamics of fiction, “The story tells a story of punishment; the story punishes as story; the storyteller represents him- or herself as an altruistic punisher by telling it” (83). However, many readers of Gatsby probably find Nick’s belated punishment insufficient, and if they fail to see the novel as a comment on the real injustice Fitzgerald saw going on around him they would be both confused and disappointed by the way the story ends.

Read part 2

I am Jack’s Raging Insomnia: The Tragically Overlooked Moral Dilemma at the Heart of Fight Club

Image by Canva’s Magic Media

[This essay is a brief distillation of ideas explored in much greater depth in Hierarchies in Hell and Leaderless Fight Clubs: Altruism, Narrative Interest, and the Adaptive Appeal of Bad Boys, my master’s thesis]

If you were to ask one of the millions of guys who love the movie Fight Club what the story is about, his answer would most likely emphasize the violence. He might say something like, “It’s about men returning to their primal nature and getting carried away when they find out how good it feels.” Actually, this is an answer I would expect from a guy with exceptional insight. A majority would probably just say it’s about a bunch of guys who get together to beat the crap out of each other and pull a bunch pranks. Some might remember all the talk about IKEA and other consumerist products. Our insightful guy may even connect the dots and explain that consumerism somehow made the characters in the movie feel emasculated, and so they had to resort to fighting and vandalism to reassert their manhood. But, aside from ensuring they would know what a duvet is—“It’s a fucking blanket”—what is it exactly about shopping for household décor and modern conveniences that makes men less manly?

Maybe Fight Club is just supposed to be fun, with all the violence, and the weird sex scene with Marla, and all the crazy mischief the guys get into, but also with a few interesting monologues and voiceovers to hint at deeper meanings. And of course there’s Tyler Durden—fearless, clever, charismatic, and did you see those shredded abs? Not only does he not take shit from anyone, he gets a whole army to follow his lead, loyal to the death. On the other hand, there’s no shortage of characters like this in movies, and if that’s all men liked about Fight Club they wouldn’t sit through all the plane flights, support groups, and soap-making. It just may be that, despite the rarity of fans who can articulate what they are, the movie actually does have profound and important resonances.

If you recall, the Edward Norton character, whom I’ll call Jack (following the convention of the script), decides that his story should begin with the advent of his insomnia. He goes to the doctor but is told nothing is wrong with him. His first night’s sleep comes only after he goes to a support group and meets Bob, he of the “bitch tits,” and cries a smiley face onto his t-shirt. But along comes Marla who like Jack is visiting support groups but is not in fact recovering, sick, or dying. She is another tourist. As long as she's around, he can’t cry, and so he can’t sleep. Soon after Jack and Marla make a deal to divide the group meetings and avoid each other, Tyler Durden shows up and we’re on our way to Fight Clubs and Project Mayhem. Now, why the hell would we accept these bizarre premises and continue watching the movie unless at some level Jack’s difficulties, as well as their solutions, make sense to us?

So why exactly was it that Jack couldn’t sleep at night? The simple answer, the one that Tyler gives later in the movie, is that he’s unhappy with his life. He hates his job. Something about his “filing cabinet” apartment rankles him. And he’s alone. Jack’s job is to fly all over the country to investigate accidents involving his company’s vehicles and to apply “the formula.” I’m going to quote from Chuck Palahniuk’s book:

You take the population of vehicles in the field (A) and multiply it by the probable rate of failure (B), then multiply the result by the average cost of an out-of-court settlement (C).

A times B times C equals X. This is what it will cost if we don’t initiate a recall.

If X is greater than the cost of a recall, we recall the cars and no one gets hurt.

If X is less than the cost of a recall, then we don’t recall (30).

Palahniuk's inspiration for Jack's job was an actual case involving the Ford Pinto. What this means is that Jack goes around trying to protect his company's bottom line to the detriment of people who drive his company's cars. You can imagine the husband or wife or child or parent of one of these accident victims hearing about this job and asking Jack, "How do you sleep at night?"

Going to support groups makes life seem pointless, short, and horrible. Ultimately, we all have little control over our fates, so there's no good reason to take responsibility for anything. When Jack burst into tears as Bob pulls his face into his enlarged breasts, he's relinquishing all accountability; he's, in a sense, becoming a child again. Accordingly, he's able to sleep like a baby. When Marla shows up, not only is he forced to confront the fact that he's healthy and perfectly able to behave responsibly, but he is also provided with an incentive to grow up because, as his fatuous grin informs us, he likes her. And, even though the support groups eventually fail to assuage his guilt, they do inspire him with the idea of hitting bottom, losing all control, losing all hope.

Here’s the crucial point: If Jack didn't have to worry about losing his apartment, or losing all his IKEA products, or losing his job, or falling out of favor with his boss, well, then he would be free to confront that same boss and tell him what he really thinks of the operation that has supported and enriched them both. Enter Tyler Durden, who systematically turns all these conditionals into realities. In game theory terms, Jack is both a 1st order and a 2nd order free rider because he both gains at the expense of others and knowingly allows others to gain in the same way. He carries on like this because he's more motivated by comfort and safety than he is by any assurance that he's doing right by other people.

This is where Jack being of "a generation of men raised by women" becomes important (50). Fathers and mothers tend to treat children differently. A study that functions well symbolically in this context examined the ways moms and dads tend to hold their babies in pools. Moms hold them facing themselves. Dads hold them facing away. Think of the way Bob's embrace of Jack changes between the support group and the fight club. When picked up by moms, babies breathing and heart-rates slow. Just the opposite happens when dads pick them up--they get excited. And if you inventory the types of interactions that go on between the two parents it's easy to see why.

Not only do dads engage children in more rough-and-tumble play; they are also far more likely to encourage children to take risks. In one study, fathers told they'd have to observe their child climbing a slope from a distance making any kind of rescue impossible in the event of a fall set the slopes at a much steeper angle than mothers in the same setup.

Fight Club isn't about dominance or triumphalism or white males' reaction to losing control; it's about men learning that they can't really live if they're always playing it safe. Jack actually says at one point that winning or losing doesn't much matter. Indeed, one of the homework assignments Tyler gives everyone is to start a fight and lose. The point is to be willing to risk a fight when it's necessary--i.e. when someone attempts to exploit or seduce you based on the assumption that you'll always act according to your rational self-interest.

And the disturbing truth is that we are all lulled into hypocrisy and moral complacency by the allures of consumerism. We may not be "recall campaign coordinators" like Jack. But do we know or care where our food comes from? Do we know or care how our soap is made? Do we bother to ask why Disney movies are so devoid of the gross mechanics of life? We would do just about anything for comfort and safety. And that is precisely how material goods and material security have emasculated us. It's easy to imagine Jack's mother soothing him to sleep some night, saying, "Now, the best thing to do, dear, is to sit down and talk this out with your boss."

There are two scenes in Fight Club that I can't think of any other word to describe but sublime. The first is when Jack finally confronts his boss, threatening to expose the company's practices if he is not allowed to leave with full salary. At first, his boss reasons that Jack's threat is not credible, because bringing his crimes to light would hurt Jack just as much. But the key element to what game theorists call altruistic punishment is that the punisher is willing to incur risks or costs to mete out justice. Jack, having been well-fathered, as it were, by Tyler, proceeds to engage in costly signaling of his willingness to harm himself by beating himself up, literally. In game theory terms, he's being rationally irrational, making his threat credible by demonstrating he can't be counted on to pursue his own rational self-interest. The money he gets through this maneuver goes, of course, not into anything for Jack, but into Fight Club and Project Mayhem.

The second sublime scene, and for me the best in the movie, is the one in which Jack is himself punished for his complicity in the crimes of his company. How can a guy with stitches in his face and broken teeth, a guy with a chemical burn on his hand, be punished? Fittingly, he lets Tyler get them both in a car accident. At this point, Jack is in control of his life, he's no longer emasculated. And Tyler flees.

One of the confusing things about the movie is that it has two overlapping plots. The first, which I've been exploring up to this point, centers on Jack's struggle to man up and become an altruistic punisher. The second is about the danger of violent reactions to the murder machine of consumerism. The male ethic of justice through violence can all too easily morph into fascism. And so, once Jack has created this father figure and been initiated into manhood by him, he then has to reign him in--specifically, he has to keep him from killing Marla. This second plot entails what anthropologist Christopher Boehm calls a "domination episode," in which an otherwise egalitarian group gets taken over by a despot who must then be defeated. Interestingly, only Jack knows for sure how much authority Tyler has, because Tyler seemingly undermines that authority by giving contradictory orders. But by now Jack is well schooled on how to beat Tyler--pretty much the same way he beat his boss.

It's interesting to think about possible parallels between the way Fight Club ends and what happened a couple years later on 9/11. The violent reaction to the criminal excesses of consumerism and capitalism wasn't, as it actually occurred, homegrown. And it wasn't inspired by any primal notion of manhood but by religious fanaticism. Still, in the minds of the terrorists, the attacks were certainly a punishment, and there's no denying the cost to the punishers.

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THE ADAPTIVE APPEAL OF BAD BOYS

Bad Men

Though I had mixed feelings about the first season of Mad Men, which I picked up at Half Price Books for a steal, I still found enormous appeal in the more drawn out experience of the series unfolding. Movies lately have been leaving me tragically unmoved, with those in the action category being far too noisy and preposterous and those in the drama one too brief to establish any significant emotional investment in the characters. In a series, though, especially those in the new style pioneered by The Sopranos which eschew efforts to wrap up their plots by the end of each episode, viewers get a chance to follow characters as they develop, and the resultant investment in them makes even the most underplayed and realistic violence among them excruciatingly riveting. So, even though I found Pete Campbell, an account executive at the ad agency Sterling Cooper, the main setting for Mad Men, annoying instead of despicable, and the treatment of what we would today call sexual harassment in the office crude, self-congratulatory, and overdone, by the time I had finished watching the first season I was eager to get my hands on the second. I’ve now seen the first four seasons.

Reading up on the show on Wikipedia, I came across a few quotes from Daniel Mendelsohn’s screed against the series, “The Mad Men Account” in the New York Review of Books, and since Mendelsohn is always fascinating even when you disagree with him I made a point of reading his review after I’d finished the fourth season. His response was similar to mine in that he found himself engrossed in the show despite himself. There’s so much hoopla. But there’s so much wrong with the show. Allow me a longish quote:

The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish.

Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical ‘issues’—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.

I have to say Mendelsohn is right on the mark here—though I will take issue with his categorical claims about the acting—leaving us with the question of why so many of us, me and Mendelsohn included, find the show so fascinating. Reading the review I found myself wanting to applaud at several points as it captures so precisely, and even artistically, the show’s failings. And yet these failings seem to me mild annoyances marring the otherwise profound gratification I get from watching. Mendelsohn lights on an answer for how it can be good while being so bad, one that squares the circle by turning the shortcomings into strengths.

If the characters are bland, stereotypical sixties people instead of individuals, if the issues are advertised rather than dramatized, if everyone depicted is hopelessly venal while evincing a smug, smiling commitment to decorum, well it’s because the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, was born in 1965, and he’s trying to recreate the world of his parents. Mendelsohn quotes Weiner:

part of the show is trying to figure out—this sounds really ineloquent—trying to figure out what is the deal with my parents. Am I them? Because you know you are…. The truth is it’s such a trope to sit around and bash your parents. I don’t want it to be like that. They are my inspiration, let’s not pretend.

Mendelsohn’s clever solution to the Mad Men puzzle is that its appeal derives from its child’s-eye view of the period during which its enthusiasts’ parents were in their ascendancy. The characters aren’t deep because children wouldn’t have the wherewithal to appreciate their depth. The issues aren’t explored in all their complexity because children are only ever vaguely aware of them. For Mendelsohn, the most important characters are the Drapers’ daughter, Sally, and the neighbor kid, Glen, who first has a crush on Don’s wife, Betty, and then falls for Sally herself. And it turns out Glen is played by Weiner’s own son.

I admit the episodes that portrayed the Draper’s divorce struck me as poignant to the point of being slightly painful, resonating as they did with my memories of my own parents’ divorce. But that was in the ‘80’s not the 60’s. And Glen is, at least for me, one of the show’s annoyances, not by any means its main appeal. His long, unblinking stares at Betty, which Mendelsohn sees as so fraught with meaning, I can’t help finding creepy. The kid makes my skin crawl, much the way Pete Campbell does. I’m forced to consider that Mendelsohn, as astute as he is about a lot of the scenes and characters, is missing something, or getting something really wrong.

In trying to account for the show’s overwhelming appeal, I think Mendelsohn is a bit too clever. I haven’t done a survey but I’d wager the results would be pretty simple: it’s Don Draper stupid. While I agree that much of the characterization and background of the central character is overwrought and unsubtle (“meretricious,” “literally,” the reviewer jokes, assuming we all know the etymology of the word), I would suggest this only makes the question of his overwhelming attractiveness all the more fascinating. Mendelsohn finds him flat. But, at least in his review, he overlooks all the crucial scenes and instead, understandably, focuses on the lame flashbacks that supposedly explain his bad behavior.

All the characters are racist, Mendelsohn charges. But in the first scene of the first episode Don notices that the black busser clearing his table is smoking a rival brand of cigarettes—that he’s a potential new customer for his clients—and casually asks him what it would take for him to switch brands. When the manager arrives at the table to chide the busser for being so talkative, Don is as shocked as we are. I can’t recall a single scene in which Don is overtly racist.

Then there’s the relationship between Don and Peggy, which, as difficult as it is to believe for all the other characters, is never sexual. Everyone is sexist, yet in the first scene bringing together Don, Peggy, and Pete, our protagonist ends up chiding the younger man, who has been giving Peggy a fashion lesson, for being disrespectful. In season two, we see Don in an elevator with two men, one of whom is giving the raunchy details of his previous night’s conquest and doesn’t bother to pause the recounting when a woman enters. Her face registers something like terror, Don’s unmistakable disgust. “Take your hat off,” he says to the offender, and for a brief moment you wonder if the two men are going to tear into him. Then Don reaches over, unchecked, removes the man’s hat, and shoves it into his chest, rendering both men silent for the duration of the elevator ride. I hate to be one of those critics who reflexively resort to their pet theory, but my enjoyment of the scene long preceded my realization that it entailed an act of altruistic punishment.

The opening credits say it all, as we see a silhouetted man, obviously Don, walking into an office which begins to collapse, and cuts to him falling through the sky against the backdrop of skyscrapers with billboards and snappy slogans. How far will Don fall? For that matter, how far will Peggy? Their experiences oddly mirror each other, and it becomes clear that while Don barks denunciations at the other members of his creative team, he often goes out of his way to mentor Peggy. He’s the one, in fact, who recognizes her potential and promotes her from a secretary to a copywriter, a move which so confounds all the other men that they conclude he must have knocked her up.

Mendelsohn is especially disappointed in Mad Men’s portrayal, or rather its failure to portray, the plight of closeted gays. He complains that when Don witnesses Sal Romano kissing a male bellhop in a hotel on a business trip, the revelation “weirdly” “has no repercussions.” But it’s not weird at all because we experience some of Sal’s anxiety about how Don will react. On the plain home, Sal is terrified, but Don rather subtly lets him know he has nothing to worry about. Don can sympathize about having secrets. We can just imagine if one of the characters other than Don had been the one to discover Sal’s homosexuality—actually we don’t have to imagine it because it happens later.

Unlike the other characters, Don’s vices, chief among them his philandering, are timeless (except his chain-smoking) and universal. And though we can’t forgive him for what he does to Betty (another annoying character, who, like some women I’ve dated, uses the strategy of being constantly aggrieved to trick you into being nice to her, which backfires because the suggestion that your proclivities aren’t nice actually provokes you), we can’t help hoping that he’ll find a way to redeem himself. As cheesy as they are, the scenes that have Don furrowing his brow and extemporizing on what people want and how he can turn it into a marketing strategy, along with the similar ones in which he feels the weight of his crimes against others, are my favorites. His voice has the amazing quality of being authoritative and yet at the same time signaling vulnerability. This guy should be able to get it. But he’s surrounded by vipers. His job is to lie. His identity is a lie he can’t escape. How will he preserve his humanity, his soul? Or will he? These questions, and similar ones about Peggy, are what keep me watching.

Don Draper, then, is a character from a long tradition of bad boys who give contradictory signals of their moral worth. Milton inadvertently discovered how powerful these characters are when Satan turned out to be by far the most compelling character in Paradise Lost. (Byron understood why immediately.) George Lucas made a similar discovery when Han Solo stole the show from Luke Skywalker. From Tom Sawyer to Jack Sparrow and Tony Soprano (Weiner was also a writer on that show), the fascination with these guys savvy enough to get away with being bad but sensitive and compassionate enough to feel bad about it has been taking a firm grip on audiences sympathies since long before Don Draper put on his hat.

A couple final notes on the show's personal appeal for me: given my interests and education, marketing and advertising would be a natural fit for me, absent my moral compunctions about deceiving people to their detriment to enrich myself. Still, it's nice to see a show focusing on the processes behind creativity. Then there's the scene in season four in which Don realizes he's in love with his secretary because she doesn't freak out when his daughter spills her milkshake. Having spent too much of my adult life around women with short fuses, and so much of my time watching Mad Men being annoyed with Betty, I laughed until I teared up.

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SABBATH SAYS: PHILIP ROTH AND THE DILEMMAS OF IDEOLOGICAL CASTRATION

The Inverted Pyramid: Our Millennia-Long Project of Keeping Alpha Males in their Place

Imagine this familiar hypothetical scenario: you’re a prehistoric hunter, relying on cleverness, athleticism, and well-honed skills to track and kill a gazelle on the savannah. After carting the meat home, your wife is grateful—or your wives rather. As the top hunter in the small tribe with which your family lives and travels, you are accorded great power over all the other men, just as you enjoy great power over your family. You are the leader, the decision-maker, the final arbiter of disputes and the one everyone looks to for direction in times of distress. The payoff for all this responsibility is that you and your family enjoy larger shares of whatever meat is brought in by your subordinates. And you have sexual access to almost any woman you choose. Someday, though, you know your prowess will be on the wane, and you’ll be subjected to more and more challenges from younger men, until eventually you will be divested of all your authority. This is the harsh reality of man the hunter.

It’s easy to read about “chimpanzee politics” (I’ll never forget reading Frans de Waal’s book by that title) or watch nature shows in which the stentorian, accented narrator assigns names and ranks to chimps or gorillas and then, looking around at the rigid hierarchies of the institutions where we learn or where we work, as well as those in the realm of actual human politics, and conclude that there must have been a pretty linear development from the ancestors we share with the apes to the eras of pharaohs and kings to the Don Draperish ‘60’s till today, at least in terms of our natural tendency to form rank and follow leaders.

What to make, then, of these words spoken to anthropologist Richard Lee by a hunter-gatherer teaching him of the ways of the !Kung San?

“Say that a man has been hunting. He must not come home and announce like a braggart, ‘I have killed a big one in the bush!’ He must first sit down in silence until I or someone else comes up to his fire and asks, ‘What did you see today?’ He replies quietly, ‘Ah, I’m no good for hunting. I saw nothing at all…maybe just a tiny one.’ Then I smile to myself because I now know he has killed something big.” (Quoted in Boehm 45)

Even more puzzling from a selfish gene perspective is that the successful hunter gets no more meat for himself or his family than any of the other hunters. They divide it equally. Lee asked his informants why they criticized the hunters who made big kills.

“When a young man kills much meat, he comes to think of himself as a chief or big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. We can’t accept this.”

So what determines who gets to be the Alpha, if not hunting prowess? According to Christopher Boehm, the answer is simple. No one gets to be the Alpha. “A distinctly egalitarian political style is highly predictable wherever people live in small, locally autonomous social and economic groups” (36). These are exactly the types of groups humans have lived in for the vast majority of their existence on Earth. This means that, uniquely among the great apes, humans evolved mechanisms to ensure egalitarianism alongside those for seeking and submitting to power.

Boehm’s Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior is a miniature course in anthropology, as dominance and submission—as well as coalition building and defiance—are examined not merely in the ethnographic record, but in the ethological descriptions of our closest ape relatives. Building on Bruce Knauft’s observations of the difference between apes and hunter-gatherers, Boehm argues that “with respect to political hierarchy human evolution followed a U-shaped trajectory” (65). But human egalitarianism is not based on a simple of absence of hierarchy; rather, Boehm theorizes that the primary political actors (who with a few notable exceptions tend to be men) decide on an individual basis that, while power may be desirable, the chances of any individual achieving it are small, and the time span during which he would be able to sustain it would be limited. Therefore, they all submit to the collective will that no man should have authority over any other, thus all of them maintain their own personal autonomy. Boehm explains

“In despotic social dominance hierarchies the pyramid of power is pointed upward, with one or a few individuals (usually male) at the top exerting authority over a submissive rank and file. In egalitarian hierarchies the pyramid of power is turned upside down, with a politically united rank and file decisively dominating the alpha-male types” (66).

This isn’t to say that there aren’t individuals who by dint of their prowess and intelligence enjoy more influence over the band than others, but such individuals are thought of as “primus inter pares” (33), a first among equals. “Foragers,” Boehm writes, “are not intent on true and absolute equality, but on a kind of mutual respect that leaves individual autonomy intact” (68). It’s as though the life of the nomadic hunter and forager is especially conducive to thinking in terms of John Rawls’s “veil of ignorance.”

The mechanisms whereby egalitarianism is enforced will be familiar to anyone who’s gone to grade school or who works with a group of adult peers. Arrogant and bullying individuals are the butt of jokes, gossip, and ostracism. For a hunter-gatherer these can be deadly. Reputations are of paramount importance. If all else fails and a despot manages to secure some level authority, instigating a “dominance episode,” his reign will be short-lived. Even the biggest and strongest men are vulnerable to sizable coalitions of upstarts—especially in species who excel at making weapons for felling big game.

Boehm address several further questions, like what conditions bring about the reinstitution of pyramidal hierarchies, and how have consensus decision-making and social pressure against domineering affected human evolution? But what I find most interesting are his thoughts about the role of narrative in the promulgation and maintenance of the egalitarian ethos:

“As practical political philosophers, foragers perceive quite correctly that self-aggrandizement and individual authority are threats to personal autonomy. When upstarts try to make inroads against an egalitarian social order, they will be quickly recognized and, in many cases, quickly curbed on a preemptive basis. One reason for this sensitivity is that the oral tradition of a band (which includes knowledge from adjacent bands) will preserve stories about serious domination episodes. There is little doubt that many of the ethnographic reports of executions in my survey were based on such traditions, as opposed to direct ethnographic observation” (87).

Art as Altruism: Lily Briscoe and the Ghost of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse Part 2 of 2

The question remains, though, of why Virginia Woolf felt it necessary to recall scenes from her childhood in order to lay to rest her inner conflict over her chosen way of life—if that is indeed what To the Lighthouse did for her. She did not, in fact, spend her entire life single but married her husband Leonard in 1912 at the age of thirty and stayed with him until her death in 1941. The Woolfs had been married fifteen years by the time Lighthouse was published (Lee 314). But Virginia’s marriage was quite different from her mother Julia’s. For one, as is made abundantly clear in her diaries, Leonard Woolf was much more supportive and much less demanding than her father Leslie Stephens. More important, though, Julia had seven children of her own and cared for one of Leslie’s from a previous marriage (Lee xx), whereas Virginia remained childless all her life. But, even if she felt her lifestyle represented such a cataclysmic break from her mother’s cultural tradition, it is remarkable that the pain of this partition persisted from the time of Julia’s death when Virginia was thirteen, until the writing of Lighthouse when she was forty-four—the same age as Lily in the last section of the novel. Lily returns to the Ramsays’ summer house ten years after the visit described in the first section, Mrs. Ramsay having died rather mysteriously in the interim, and sets to painting the same image she struggled to capture before. “She had never finished that picture. She would paint that picture now. It had been knocking about in her mind all these years” (147). But why should Lily experience such difficulty handling a conflict of views with a woman who has been dead for years?

Wilson sees the universal propensity among humans to carry on relationships with supernatural beings—like the minds and personalities of the dead, but also including disembodied characters like deities—as one of a host of mechanisms, partly cultural, partly biological, devoted to ensuring group cohesion. In his book Darwin’s Cathedral, in which he attempts to explain religion in terms of his group selection theory, he writes,

A group of people who abandon self-will and work tirelessly for a greater good will fare very well as a group, much better than if they all pursue their private utilities, as long as the greater good corresponds to the welfare of the group. And religions almost invariably do link the greater good to the welfare of the community of believers, whether an organized modern church or an ethnic group for whom religion is thoroughly intermixed with the rest of their culture. Since religion is such an ancient feature of our species, I have no problem whatsoever imagining the capacity for selflessness and longing to be part of something larger than ourselves as part of our genetic and cultural heritage. (175)

One of the main tasks religious beliefs must handle is the same “free-rider problem” William Flesch discovers at the heart of narrative. What religion offers beyond the social monitoring of group members is the presence of invisible beings whose concerns are tied in to the collective concerns of the group. Jesse Bering contributes to this perspective by positing a specific cognitive mechanism which paved the way for the evolution of beliefs about invisible agents, and his theory provides a crucial backdrop for any discussion of the role the dead play for the living, in life or in literature. Of course, Mrs. Ramsay is not a deity, and though Lily feels as she paints “a sense of some one there, of Mrs. Ramsay, relieved for a moment of the weight that the world had put on her” (181), which she earlier describes as, “Ghost, air, nothingness, a thing you could play with easily and safely at any time of day or night, she had been that, and then suddenly she put her hand out and wrung the heart thus” (179), she does not believe Mrs. Ramsay is still around in any literal sense. Bering suggests this “nothingness” with the power to wring the heart derives from the same capacity humans depend on to know, roughly, what other humans are thinking. Though there is much disagreement about whether apes understand differences in each other’s knowledge and intentions, it is undeniably the case that humans far outshine any other creature in their capacity to reason about the inner, invisible workings of the minds of their conspecifics. We are so predisposed to this type of reasoning that, according to Bering, we apply it to natural phenomena in which no minds are involved. He writes,

just like other people’s surface behaviors, natural events can be perceived by us human beings as being about something other than their surface characteristics only because our brains are equipped with the specialized cognitive software, theory of mind, that enables us to think about underlying psychological causes. (79)

As Lily reflects, “this making up scenes about them, is what we call ‘knowing’ people” (173). And we must make up these scenes because, like the bees hovering about the hive she compares herself to in the first section, we have no direct access to the minds of others. Yet if we are to coordinate our actions adaptively—even competitively when other groups are involved—we have no choice but to rely on working assumptions, our theories of others’ knowledge and intentions, updating them when necessary.

The reading of natural evens as signs of some mysterious mind, as well as the continued importance of minds no longer attached to bodies capable of emitting signs, might have arisen as a mere byproduct of humans’ need to understand one another, but at some point in the course our evolution our theories of disembodied minds was co-opted in the service of helping to solve the free-rider problem. In his book The God Instinct, Bering describes a series of experiments known as “The Princess Alice studies,” which have young children perform various tasks after being primed to believe an invisible agent (named Alice in honor of Bering’s mother) is in the room with them. What he and his colleagues found was that Princess Alice’s influence only emerged as the children’s theory of mind developed, suggesting “the ability to be superstitious actually demands some mental sophistication” (96). But once a theory of mind is operating the suggestion of an invisible presence has a curious effect. First in a study of college students casually told about the ghost of a graduate student before taking a math test, and then in a study of children told Princess Alice was watching them as they performed a difficult task involving Velcro darts, participants primed to consider the mind of a supernatural agent were much less likely to take opportunities to cheat which were built into the experimental designs (193-4).

Because evolution took advantage of our concern for our reputations and our ability to reason about the thoughts and feelings of others to ensure cooperation, Lily’s predicament, her argument with the ghost of Mrs. Ramsay over the proper way for a woman to live, could only be resolved through proof that she was not really free-riding or cheating, but was in fact altruistic in her own way. Considering the fate of a couple Mrs. Ramsay had encouraged to marry, Lily imagines, “She would feel a little triumphant, telling Mrs. Ramsay that the marriage had not been a success.” But, she would go on, “They’re happy like that; I’m happy like this. Life has changed completely.” Thus Lily manages to “over-ride her wishes, improve away her limited, old-fashioned ideas” (174-5). Lily’s ultimate redemption, though, can only come through acknowledgement that the life she has chosen is not actually selfish. The difficulty in this task stems from the fact that “one could not imagine Mrs. Ramsay standing painting, lying reading, a whole morning on the lawn” (196). Mrs. Ramsay has no appreciation for art or literature, but for Lily it is art—and for Woolf it is literature—that is both the product of all that time alone and her contribution to society as a whole. Lily is redeemed when she finishes her painting, and that is where the novel ends. At the same time, Virginia Woolf, having completed this great work of literature, bequeathed it to society, to us, and in so doing proved her own altruism, thus laying to rest the ghost of Julia Stephens.

Also read:
THEY COMES A DAY: CELEBRATING COOPERATION IN A GATHERING OF OLD MEN AND HORTON HEARS A WHO!

T.J. ECKLEBURG SEES EVERYTHING: THE GREAT GOD-GAP IN GATSBY

MADNESS AND BLISS: CRITICAL VERSUS PRIMITIVE READINGS IN A.S. BYATT’S POSSESSION: A ROMANCE

Art as Altruism: Lily Briscoe and the Ghost of Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse Part 1 of 2

Virginia Woolf underwent a transformation in the process of writing To the Lighthouse the nature of which has been the subject of much scholarly inquiry. At the center of the novel is the relationship between the beautiful, self-sacrificing, and yet officious Mrs. Ramsay, and the retiring, introverted artist Lily Briscoe. “I wrote the book very quickly,” Woolf recalls in “Sketch of the Past,” “and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.” Quoting these lines, biographer Hermione Lee suggests the novel is all about Woolf’s parents, “a way of pacifying their ghosts” (476). But how exactly did writing the novel function to end Woolf’s obsession with her mother? And, for that matter, why would she, at forty-four, still be obsessed with a woman who had died when she was only thirteen? Evolutionary psychologist Jesse Bering suggests that while humans are uniquely capable of imagining the inner workings of each other’s minds, the cognitive mechanisms underlying this capacity, which psychologists call “theory of mind,” simply fail to comprehend the utter extinction of those other minds. However, the lingering presence of the dead is not merely a byproduct of humans’ need to understand and communicate with other living humans. Bering argues that the watchful gaze of disembodied minds—real or imagined—serves a type of police function, ensuring that otherwise selfish and sneaky individuals cooperate and play by the rules of society. From this perspective, Woolf’s struggle with her mother, and its manifestation as Lily’s struggle with Mrs. Ramsay, represents a sort of trial in which the younger living woman defends herself against a charge of selfishness leveled by her deceased elder. And since Woolf’s obsession with her mother ceased upon completion of the novel, she must have been satisfied that she had successfully exonerated herself.

Woolf made no secret of the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay were fictionalized versions of her own parents, and most critics see Lily as a stand-in for the author—even though she is merely a friend of the Ramsay family. These complex relationships between author and character, and between daughter and parents, lie at the heart of a dynamic which readily lends itself to psychoanalytic explorations. Jane Lilienfeld, for instance, suggests Woolf created Lily as a proxy to help her accept her parents, both long dead by the time she began writing, “as monumental but flawed human beings,” whom she both adored and detested. Having reduced the grand, archetypal Mrs. Ramsay to her proper human dimensions, Lily is free to acknowledge her own “validity as a single woman, as an artist whose power comes not from manipulating others’ lives in order to fulfill herself, but one whose mature vision encapsulates and transcends reality” (372). But for all the elaborate dealings with mythical and mysterious psychic forces, the theories of Freud and Jung explain very little about why writers write and why readers read. And they explain very little about how people relate to the dead, or about what role the dead play in narrative. Freud may have been right about humans’ intense ambivalence toward their parents, but why should this tension persist long after those parents have ceased to exist? And Jung may have been correct in his detection of mythic resonances in his patients’ dreams, but what accounts for such universal narrative patterns? What do they explain?

Looking at narrative from the perspective of modern evolutionary biology offers several important insights into why people devote so much time and energy to, and get so much gratification from immersing themselves in the plights and dealings of fictional characters. Anthropologists believe the primary concern for our species at the time of its origin was the threat of rival tribes vying for control of limited resources. The legacy of this threat is the persistent proclivity for tribal—us versus them—thinking among modern humans. But alongside our penchant for dehumanizing members of out-groups arose a set of mechanisms designed to encourage—and when necessary to enforce—in-group cooperation for the sake of out-competing less cohesive tribes. Evolutionary literary theorist William Flesch sees in narrative a play of these cooperation-enhancing mechanisms. He writes, “our capacity for narrative developed as a way for us to keep track of cooperators” (67), and he goes on to suggest we tend to align ourselves with those we perceive as especially cooperative or altruistic while feeling an intense desire to see those who demonstrate selfishness get their comeuppance. This is because “altruism could not sustain an evolutionarily stable system without the contribution of altruistic punishers to punish the free-riders who would flourish in a population of purely benevolent altruists” (66). Flesch cites the findings of numerous experiments which demonstrate people’s willingness to punish those they see as exploiting unspoken social compacts and implicit rules of fair dealing, even when meting out that punishment involves costs or risks to the punisher (31-34). Child psychologist Karen Wynn has found that even infants too young to speak prefer to play with puppets or blocks with crude plastic eyes that have in some way demonstrated their altruism over the ones they have seen behaving selfishly or aggressively (557-560). Such experiments lead Flesch to posit a social monitoring and volunteered affect theory of narrative interest, whereby humans track the behavior of others, even fictional others, in order to assess their propensity for altruism or selfishness and are anxious to see that the altruistic are vindicated while the selfish are punished. In responding thus to other people’s behavior, whether they are fictional or real, the individual signals his or her own propensity for second- or third-order altruism.

The plot of To the Lighthouse is unlike anything else in literature, and yet a great deal of information is provided regarding the relative cooperativeness of each of the characters. Foremost among them in her compassion for others is Mrs. Ramsay. While it is true from the perspective of her own genetic interests that her heroic devotion to her husband and their eight children can be considered selfish, she nonetheless extends her care beyond the sphere of her family. She even concerns herself with the tribulations of complete strangers, something readers discover early in the novel, as

she ruminated the other problem, of rich and poor, and the things she saw with her own eyes… when she visited this widow, or that struggling wife in person with a bag on her arm, and a note- book and pencil with which she wrote down in columns carefully ruled for the purpose wages and spendings, employment and unemployment, in the hope that thus she would cease to be a private woman whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half relief to her own curiosity, and become what with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an investigator, elucidating the social problem. (9)

No sooner does she finish reflecting on this social problem than she catches sight of her husband’s friend Charles Tansley, who is feeling bored and “out of things,” because no one staying at the Ramsays’ summer house likes him. Regardless of the topic Tansley discusses with them, “until he had turned the whole thing around and made it somehow reflect himself and disparage them—he was not satisfied” (8). And yet Mrs. Ramsay feels compelled to invite him along on an errand so that he does not have to be alone. Before leaving the premises, though, she has to ask yet another houseguest, Augustus Carmichael, “if he wanted anything” (10). She shows this type of exquisite sensitivity to others’ feelings and states of mind throughout the first section of the novel.

Mrs. Ramsay’s feelings about Lily, another houseguest, are at once dismissive and solicitous. Readers are introduced to Lily only through Mrs. Ramsay’s sudden realization, after prolonged absentmindedness, that she is supposed to be holding still so Lily can paint her. Mrs. Ramsay’s son James, who is sitting with her as he cuts pictures out of a catalogue, makes a strange noise she worries might embarrass him. She turns to see if anyone has heard: “Only Lily Briscoe, she was glad to find; and that did not matter.” Mrs. Ramsay is doing Lily the favor of posing, but the gesture goes no further than mere politeness. Still, there is a quality the younger woman possesses that she admires. “With her little Chinese eyes,” Mrs. Ramsay thinks, “and her puckered-up face, she would never marry; one could not take her painting very seriously; she was an independent little creature, and Mrs. Ramsay liked her for it” (17). Lily’s feelings toward her hostess, on the other hand, though based on a similar recognition that the other enjoys aspects of life utterly foreign to her, are much more intense. At one point early in the novel, Lily wonders, “what could one say to her?” The answer she hazards is “I’m in love with you?” But she decides that is not true and settles on, “‘I’m in love with this all,’ waving her hand at the hedge, at the house, at the children” (19). What Lily loves, and what she tries to capture in her painting, is the essence of the family life Mrs. Ramsay represents, the life Lily herself has rejected in pursuit of her art. It must be noted too that, though Mrs. Ramsay is not related to Lily, Lily has only an elderly father, and so some of the appeal of the large, intact Ramsay family to Lily is the fact that she has been sometime without a mother.

Apart from admiring in the other what each lacks herself, the two women share little in common. The tension between them derives from Lily’s having resigned herself to life without a husband, life in the service of her art and caring for her father, while Mrs. Ramsay simply cannot imagine how any woman could be content without a family. Underlying this conviction is Mrs. Ramsay’s unique view of men and her relationship to them:

Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl—pray Heaven it was none of her daughters!—who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones! (6)

In other words, woe betide Lily Briscoe. Anthropologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, whose work on the evolution of cooperation in humans provides the foundation for Flesch’s theory of narrative, put forth the idea that culture functions to simultaneously maintain group cohesion and to help the group adapt to whatever environment it inhabits. “Human cultures,” they point out, “can change even more quickly than the most rapid examples of genetic evolution by natural selection” (43). What underlies the divergence of views about women’s roles between the two women in Woolf’s novel is that their culture is undergoing major transformations owing to political and economic upheaval in the lead-up to The First World War.

Lily has no long-established tradition of women artists in which to find solace and guidance; rather, the most salient model of womanhood is the family-minded, self-sacrificing Mrs. Ramsay. It is therefore to Mrs. Ramsay that Lily must justify her attempt at establishing a new tradition. She reads the older woman as making the implicit claim that “an unmarried woman has missed the best of life.” In response, Lily imagines how

gathering a desperate courage she would urge her own exemption from the universal law; plead for it; she liked to be alone; she liked to be herself; she was not made for that; and so have to meet a serious stare from eyes of unparalleled depth, and confront Mrs. Ramsay’s simple certainty… that her dear Lily, her little Brisk, was a fool. (50)

Living alone, being herself, and refusing to give up her time or her being to any husband or children strikes even Lily herself as both selfish and illegitimate, lacking cultural sanction and therefore doubly selfish. Trying to figure out the basis of her attraction to Mrs. Ramsay, beyond her obvious beauty, Lily asks herself, “did she lock up within her some secret which certainly Lily Briscoe believed people must have for the world to go on at all? Every one could not be as helter skelter, hand to mouth as she was” (50). Lily’s dilemma is that she can either be herself, or she can be a member of a family, because being a member of a family means she cannot be wholly herself; like Mrs. Ramsay, she would have to make compromises, and her art would cease to have any more significance than the older woman’s note-book with all its writing devoted to social problems. But she must justify devoting her life only to herself. Meanwhile, she’s desperate for some form of human connection beyond the casual greetings and formal exchanges that take place under the Ramsays’ roof.

Lily expresses a desire not just for knowledge from Mrs. Ramsay but for actual unity with her because what she needs is “nothing that could be written in any language known to men.” She wants to be intimate with the “knowledge and wisdom… stored up in Mrs. Ramsay’s heart,” not any factual information that could be channeled through print. The metaphor Lily uses for her struggle is particularly striking for anyone who studies human evolution.

How then, she had asked herself, did one know one thing or another thing about people, sealed as they were? Only like a bee, drawn by some sweetness or sharpness in the air intangible to touch or taste, one haunted the dome-shaped hive, ranged the wastes of the air over the countries of the world alone, and then haunted the hives with their murmurs and their stirrings; the hives, which were people. (51)

According to evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson, bees are one of only about fifteen species of social insect that have crossed the “Cooperation Divide,” beyond which natural selection at the level of the group supercedes selection at the level of the individual. “Social insect colonies qualify as organisms,” Wilson writes, “not because they are physically bounded but because their members coordinate their activities in organ-like fashion to perpetuate the whole” (144). The main element that separates humans from their ancestors and other primates, he argues, “is that we are evolution’s newest transition from groups of organisms to groups as organisms. Our social groups are the primate equivalent of bodies and beehives” (154). The secret locked away from Lily in Mrs. Ramsay’s heart, the essence of the Ramsay family that she loves so intensely and feels compelled to capture in her painting, is that human individuals are adapted to life in groups of other humans who together represent a type of unitary body. In trying to live by herself and for herself, Lily is going not only against the cultural traditions of the previous generation but even against her own nature.

Part 2.

They Comes a Day: Celebrating Cooperation in A Gathering of Old Men and Horton Hears a Who! Part 3

Read from the beginning.

            The grudging respect all the men on the Marshall plantation feel toward Mathu owing to his readiness to engage in altruistic punishment affords him a status almost equal to the whites. Sheriff Mapes, after letting Lou Dimes, Candy’s white boyfriend, know that he “wasn’t much of a man in his eyesight” because Dimes doesn’t seem capable of standing up to his girlfriend, goes on to say that he admires Mathu. “He’s a better man than most I’ve met, black or white” (74). Later in the novel, a character named Rooster says of Mathu,

He never thought much of me. Used to call me Little Red Rooster all the time. People even said him and Beulah had fooled around some behind my back. I never asked him, I never asked her—I was too scared. But I wasn’t scared now. He knowed I wasn’t scared now. That’s why he was smiling at me. And that made me feel good (181).

We may think less of Mathu’s altruism in light of his fooling around with another man’s wife, but it has become clear over the course of the plot that the men who don’t stand up against their oppressors, out of short-sighted fear, are in a sense responsible for their own mistreatment. (And Beulah’s willingness to fool around with Mathu can’t be overlooked as evidence of his increased reproductive potential.) Mathu goes on to admit to the gathered old men that he “hated y’all ‘cause you never tried.” But he says, “I been changed by y’all. Rooster, Clabber, Dirty Red, Coot—you changed this hardhearted old man” (182). This is the men’s vindication; they get to be recognized as men by the single one among them who hitherto enjoyed that distinction. He can be said to be playing the role of second-order altruist, rewarding and punishing those he interacts with, not just on the basis of how they treat him directly, but how they treat others in the group.

            This indirect or strong reciprocity has likewise been demonstrated in experiments by game theorists, and Flesch finds in it the final piece of what he calls “the puzzle of narrative interest,” by which he means “anxiety on behalf of and about the motives, actions, and experiences of fictional characters” (7). A variation of the ultimatum game called the dictator game eliminates the condition whereby the receiver of the proposed split has the option to veto it and ensure that neither player gets any money. With this set up, proposed splits become more lop-sided, though they still seldom drop below a certain limit. Outcomes become even more interesting when a third player is introduced who witnesses the exchange and is given the opportunity to pay either to reward or punish either of the players. It is furthermore explained to this third person that whatever contribution he or she makes will be amplified by a factor of four by the experimenter. Flesch writes,

Note that the third player gets nothing out of paying to reward or punish except the power or agency to do just that. It is highly irrational for this player to pay to reward or punish, but again considerations of fairness trump rational self-interest. People do pay, and pay a substantial amount, when they think that someone has been treated notably unfairly, or when they think someone has evinced marked generosity, to affect what they have observed (33).

Neuroscientists have even zeroed in on the brain regions that correspond to our suppression of immediate self-interest in the service of altruistic punishment, as well as those responsible for the pleasure we take in anticipating—though not in actually witnessing—free riders meeting with their just deserts (Knoch et al. 829; Quevain et al. 1254). Taken together, the evidence Flesch presents suggests we volunteer affect on behalf of fictional characters who show themselves to be altruists and against those who show themselves to be selfish actors or exploiters, experiencing both frustration and delight in the unfolding of the plot as we hope to see the altruists prevail and the free-riders get their comeuppance. And our capacity for this type of emotional engagement with fiction likely evolved because it serves as a signal to anyone monitoring us as we read or view the story, or as we discuss it later, that we are disposed either toward altruistic punishment or toward third-order free-riding ourselves—and altruism is a costly signal of fitness.

            This dynamic interplay of rational self-interest and altruism is so central to human nature that it lies at the heart of stories as diverse in their themes and social implications as Seuss’s tale of tiny Whos and Gaines’ of elderly black men finally availing themselves of an opportunity to stand up as men. If Horton didn’t go the great lengths he does to save the microscopic persons he hears calling for help, if he’d given up trying to help them once Vlad Vlad-i-koff flew away with them over the mountains, then the young children who experience the story wouldn’t believe the elephant was quite human—and the story would be pretty lame to boot. The most remarkable part of the story, though, is that there’s really no way to determine whether the Whos prove their personhood by surpassing some decibel limit to become audible to the jungle animals or whether they do it by getting every last Who to cooperate. This ambiguity is highlighted by the fact that the final Who to shout is so small: “They’ve proved they ARE persons no matter how small,” Horton declares. “And their whole world was saved by the Smallest of All!” An interesting counterpoint to Jo-Jo’s smallness is how massive Charlie is in Gathering. Charlie turns out to the one who shot Beau. One might think that owing to his large size he, like Horton, is more capable than the others of fending off exploitation at the hands of free-riders. But he admits, “All my natural-born black life I took the ‘busing and never hit back” (189).

            Charlie, of course, isn’t alone in his failure to punish those who abuse him or those he loves. In a moving chapter narrated by a man named Rufe, several of the men tell stories of horrible treatment at the hands of one or another white person, all of whom were allowed to get away with it without so much as a word of rebuke. After a man named Tucker tells a story which ends with his confession that “I didn’t do nothing but stand there and watch them beat my brother to the ground,” Rufe says, “We had all done the same thing sometime or another; we had all seen our brother, sister, mama, daddy insulted once and didn’t do a thing about it” (97). And so in game theory terms all the gathered men, excepting Mathu, are second-order free-riders, deserving of punishment themselves in the eyes of men like Mapes and Mathu. Tucker expresses this culpability when he calls out for his brother’s forgiveness and goes on to chastise himself, saying, “Out of fear of a little pain to my own body, I beat my own brother with a stalk of cane as much as the white folks did” (98). After hearing this and several other stories, Mapes says in frustration, “So this is payday, huh? And it’s all on Fix, huh? Whether he had anything to do with it or not, Fix must pay for everything ever happened to you, huh?” (107). What the men are really doing, though, is refusing to stand idly by as another man gets abused and murdered out of fear of a little bodily damage. As Mathu explains to Mapes after the sheriff asks him if he wants to see these men get hurt, “A man got to do what he think is right, Sheriff.” He continues, “That’s what part him from a boy” (85).

            Just as the ability to cooperate lies at the heart of the Whos’ personhood in Horton, manhood is defined in Gathering as a willingness to stand up, to risk injury or death in an attempt to prevent others from abusing or exploiting the man himself or those he cares about. Men are altruistic punishers. As Rufe says of Mapes, “he knowed Mathu had never backed down from anybody, either. Maybe that’s why he liked him. To him Mathu was a real man. The rest of us wasn’t” (84). The rest of them weren’t, that is, until the day Beau gets shot. The first one to begin the transition is Charlie, who in telling the story to the sheriff of how Beau was mistreating him says, “You don’t talk to a man like that, Sheriff, not when he reach half a hundred”—or fifty years of age. Charlie’s change surprises no one quite as much as it does Beau. “He knowed I wasn’t going to hit him” (190), Charlie says, describing a standoff between the two of them. But Charlie does hit him. And that’s when Beau gets his gun to go after Charlie, who flees to Mathu’s house. “Parrain told me he had a gun there, too, and he said he rather see me laying there dead than to run from another man when I was fifty years old.” When Charlie hesitates, Mathu shoves his gun into the younger man’s hands, and Charlie says, “I didn’t want to take the gun, but I could tell in Parrain’s face if I didn’t, he was go’n stop Beau himself, and then he was go’n stop me, too” (191). Mathu is here refusing to be a second-order free-rider even for a man he serves as a surrogate father to. Charlie takes the gun. And Beau keeps on coming toward the front of the house. “He knowed I had never done nothing like that, never even thought about doing nothing like that. But they comes a day, Sheriff, they comes a day when a man got to stand” (191). After shooting and killing Beau, though, Charlie runs off to let Mathu take the fall for him. But before the novel’s end he returns, saying, “I’m ready to pay. I done dropped a heavy load. Now I know I’m a man” (193). The sheriff agrees, and even addresses Charlie as “Mr. Briggs.”

            Beau turns out to be only one of several people who get their comeuppance as the plot unfolds. Fix gets his when his own son Gil refuses to join a lynch mob to go after Mathu, thus repudiating his conviction that blacks are inferior and undeserving of due process. Talking to a deputy named Russ who’s trying to convince him to return to his college town and prepare for a football game the next day, Gil asks, “What about my papa? ... I’ve already killed him. Bury him tomorrow?” (151). Luke Will, Fix’s friend who actually does get a group of guys together with guns to seek revenge against Mathu, ends up killing and getting killed in turn by Charlie. Reverend Jameson gets humiliated by Beulah who calls him a “bootlicker” (105) and forces him to back down by taunting him. Even Candy, the white woman who orchestrated the gathering, gets excluded from the men’s meeting inside the house. And when she refuses to leave, “Lou picked her up, under his arm, and came with her down the steps. Candy was cussing him, hitting at him, cussing Mapes, kicking, but Lou didn’t pay her any mind. He took her out to the road, throwed her into her own car, and slammed the door” (177).So Lou Dimes gets to redeem himself and establish his own manhood by altruistically punishing Candy.

            One of the most interesting punishments, though, is the one suffered by Sheriff Mapes. During the trial that ensues in the wake of the gunfight outside Mathu’s house, the DA demands that Mapes explain why he was unable to secure the peace. After being told to make his answer audible to the court, Mapes says, “The whole fight, I was sitting on my ass in the middle of the walk. Luke Will shot me, and I was sitting on my ass in the middle of the walk. Now, is that loud enough?” Lou goes on to describe how Mapes

got up from the witness chair and returned to the other seat. That’s when everyone in the courtroom started laughing, including Judge Reynolds. The people passing by out on the street must have thought we were showing a Charlie Chaplin movie in there. That happened the morning of the third day, and until that evening when the trial finally ended, people were still laughing. Mapes, with his left arm in a sling, stayed red all day, and would probably stay red for years to come (213).

Luke Will is only peripherally responsible for this humiliation; Mapes’s real tormenter is none other than Ernest Gaines himself. After relying on this character to serve as a type of foil and sounding board for the others, the author takes the opportunity to show us how he really feels about the sheriff’s attitude toward the Marshall men.

            Gaines’s altruistic punishment of his own character is only one of the ways he invites readers to participate in the celebration of group solidarity in his novel. Whether they realize it or not, each time they flip the page from one chapter to the next and find that the narration has been handed off from one character to another, they’re receiving the suggestion from Gaines that each of these characters wants to be heard not only by Sheriff Mapes, not just by the whites who become privy to the event through the trial and through the reporting of Lou Dimes, and not even just by the youngest generation, represented by Snookum, who, inspired by the older men, tells the sheriff “Wish I was just a little older so I coulda shot him” (109). The characters in Gathering are telling the story about how they stood up and finally punished the whites who were oppressing them to everyone who reads the book. As Flesch explains of narratives, “The story tells a story of punishment; the story punishes as story; the storyteller represents him- or herself as an altruistic punisher by telling it” (83). Gaines signals his approval for what his characters are doing by writing about it. We signal ours by reading about it and taking pleasure in the positive outcome for everyone but Charlie, who despite not surviving his dual with Luke Will, nevertheless gets the satisfaction of being addressed as, and treated as a man by both Mapes, who calls him Mr. Briggs, and his surrogate father. The handing off of the narration among the characters—but never among the ones like Mathu or Candy who might steal the show, as it were—could have highlighted differences between the various accounts, and in so doing conveyed a message of conflict. But Gaines seldom has the chapters overlap, obviating any concern for inconsistency, and the effect is a sense of the characters taking turns, trusting one another to tell their story right.

            Boyd does a good job of summing up the wonderful appeal of Horton Hears a Who! in terms which are also uncannily suited to accounting for the charm of A Gathering of Old Men. He writes,

Dr. Seuss’s comedy and his seriousness are the twin chambers of his story’s huge heart. The fantastic extravagance of Horton’s altruism makes him all the more attractive and makes us all the more readily sympathize with him, ally ourselves with his goals, and rejoice in the positive outcome for him and those he champions (376).

The main difference between the two works is that Gaines focuses more on punishment than Seuss because parents in the 1950s probably would have preferred not to expose their children to the violence that comeuppance tends to entail. But even violence can serve the goal of ensuring cooperation among self-interested individuals. And in the end it’s not the larger-than-life, self-sacrificing heroes that leave us so enchanted upon our departures from Seuss’s Jungle of Nool and Gaine’s Marshall plantation—and so eager to return. It’s rather the satisfaction we get from witnessing and vicariously participating in the larger spirit of community these heroes inspire. For there are circumstances under which humans have evolved to behave selfishly, just as there are those which nudge us toward selflessness. There is grandeur in the view that one of the aspects of our environments that inspire us to be more mindful of others is the presence in our culture of stories like Gaines’s and Seuss’s.

Also read:

FROM DARWIN TO DR. SEUSS: DOUBLING DOWN ON THE DUMBEST APPROACH TO COMBATTING RACISM

WHAT IS A STORY? AND WHAT ARE YOU SUPPOSED TO DO WITH ONE?

HOW VIOLENT FICTION WORKS: ROHAN WILSON’S “THE ROVING PARTY” AND JAMES WOOD’S SANGUINARY SUBLIME FROM CONRAD TO MCCARTHY

They Comes a Day: Celebrating Cooperation in A Gathering of Old Men and Horton Hears a Who! Part 2: Punishment

            Punishment, game theorists have found, is crucial to maintaining cooperative cohesion within a group, as it diminishes the benefits purely selfish actors can expect to gain from free-riding. It can also serve as a mechanism to lessen the threat of exploitation at the hands of outsiders who might try to join the group in order to take advantage of any established norm of altruism among its members. Flesch writes, “Darwin himself had proposed a way for altruism to evolve through the mechanism of group selection. Groups with altruists do better as a group than groups without. But it was shown in the 1960s that, in fact, such groups would be too easily infiltrated or invaded by nonaltruists” (5). Obviously, identity as a group member becomes a serious matter whenever each member relies on the others, so much so that evolutionary biologists all but ruled out even the possibility of group selection for nearly forty years. This difficulty is reflected in both Horton and Gathering by the characters whose interests aren’t in line with those of the group. Jo-Jo must be encouraged to give up his shirking and call out with the rest of the Whos for acknowledgment of their personhood. Reverend Jameson likewise signals his own selfish motives as he tries to coax Mathu into surrendering himself, saying, “I ain’t got no home if they burn this place down” (54).

            Even Candy, the white woman who sends Snookum to call the men together—thus playing a role in Gaines’s novel similar to the one Horton plays in Seuss’s story—turns out to be less motivated by the good of the group than by more personal concerns. Explaining her motives to Mrs. Merle, Candy declares, “I won’t let them touch my people” (17). Of course, Candy is risking less than the men. “Clinton can handle Mapes in court” (16), she says, meaning that with a lawyer she can count on the fair trial Mathu and the other black men can’t. When Mapes shows up, she confesses along with the others, and when he starts beating them one after another, she steps to the front of the line and says, “I’m next” (71)—again, secure in her assumption that she isn’t at risk like the others. Even though she’s never in as much danger, at this point in the novel it still seems she’s behaving altruistically, mixing herself up in trouble she had nothing to do with. However, when the men begin to consider the possibility that they’ve waited long enough, that Fix may not be coming after all, and that it may be time for everyone to put down his gun and let Mathu go with Mapes, Candy refuses to let the men even deliberate the option amongst themselves, revealing that her motives are much more selfish than they originally seemed. “I want you to help me with my own child one day” (176), she says to Mathu. “You’ll die if they put you in that jail. And this place’ll die, too. There’s no reason for this place to be if you’re not here” (177). Since her purpose is merely to save Mathu, it can even be said that she’s free-riding on the cooperation of the other black men; in that sense, she’s almost as exploitative as any other white who treats the blacks like servants. And, like Jameson, she has to be dealt with in order for the collective goals of the group to be achieved.

            Experiments that were being conducted around the same time as Gaines was writing Gathering showed that people are willing, even eager to punish others whose behavior strikes them as unfair or exploitative, even when administering that punishment involves incurring some cost to themselves. Like The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the ultimatum game involves two people, one of whom is often a confederate of the researchers, who have to decide on a strategy for interacting with one another. In this case, one of the participants is given a sum of money and told to offer the other participant a cut of it. The only catch is that the second player must accept the cut or neither player gets to keep the money. “It is irrational for the responder not to accept any proposed split from the proposer,” Flesch writes. “The responder will always come out better by accepting than vetoing” (31). But what the researchers discovered was that a line exists beneath which responders will almost always refuse the cut. “This means they are paying to punish,” Flesch explains. “They are giving up a sure gain in order to punish the selfishness of the proposer” (31). Game theorists call this behavior altruistic punishment because “the punisher’s willingness to pay this cost may be an important part in enforcing norms of fairness” (31). In other words, the punisher is incurring a cost to him or herself in order to ensure that selfish actors don’t have a chance to get a foothold in the larger, cooperative group.

            Before considering the role punishment plays in Gathering and Horton, it is important to understand another mechanism that many evolutionary biologists theorize must have been operating for cooperation to have become established in human societies, a process referred to as the handicap principle, or costly signaling. A lone altruist in any group is unlikely to fare well in terms of survival and reproduction. So the question arises as to how the minimum threshold of cooperators in a population was first surmounted. Boyd traces the process along a path from mutualism, or coincidental mutual benefits, to inclusive fitness, whereby organisms help others who are likely to share their genes—usually family members—to reciprocal altruism, a quid pro quo arrangement in which one organism will aid another in anticipation of some future repayment (54-57). But some individuals in some population of organisms in our human ancestry must have benefited from altruism that went beyond familial duty and tit-for-tat bartering. In their classic book The Handicap Principal, Amotz and Avishag Zahavi suggest that altruism serves a function in cooperative species similar to the one served by a peacock’s feathers. Conspecifics have much to gain from accurate assessments of each other’s fitness when choosing mates or allies. Many species have thus evolved methods for signaling their fitness, and as the Zahavis explain, “in order to be effective, signals have to be reliable; in order to be reliable, signals have to be costly” (xiv). A peacock signals his fitness with cumbersome plumage because his ability to survive in spite of the handicap serves as a guarantee of his strength and resourcefulness. Flesch and others find in this idea the key to solving the mystery of how altruism first became established; human altruism is, if anything, even more elaborate than the peacock’s display.

            One of the reasons Horton is the one to champion the Whos—aside from his keen hearing—is that he would be the only one in the population of jungle creatures capable of holding all the others at bay for any length of time. It takes “dozens” of the monkeys in the Wickersham family to pose a threat to the elephant, who is several times larger than any of them. Of course, the teaming up of the Wickershams with the big kangaroo and the small kangaroo in her pouch is also a show of cooperation. And their motive can even be called altruistic: “For almost two days you’ve run wild and insisted / On chatting with persons who’ve never existed. / Such carryings-on in our peaceable jungle! / We’ve had quite enough of your bellowing bungle.” Apparently, the kangaroo is concerned that Horton’s behavior is disruptive to the rest of the animals in the jungle, so she’s playing the role of altruistic punisher. This concern, along with our knowledge that no one but Horton can be sure of the Whos’ existence, probably goes a long way toward explaining why we’re content with Horton’s vindication in the end and don’t feel any need to see the monkeys or the kangaroos punished. But before being vindicated Horton endures a great deal of suffering on behalf of the Whos. The picture of the exhausted elephant picking through the field of clovers is only the beginning. Later, as the Wickershams are trying to tie him up so they can steal the clover again, “They beat him! They mauled him! They started to haul / Him into his cage!” Even in the midst of the ill-treatment, though, Horton continues exhorting the mayor of Who-ville to keep trying to gather more voices so the other animals can hear them. As Horton suffers more and more, our estimation of his altruism, and thus his fitness, grows commensurately.

            Just as Horton is unique among the jungle animals in his ability to stand up to the others, Mathu is unique among the black men on the Marshall plantation in his willingness to stand up to the whites. Upon first hearing about the gathering and its purpose, one of the men, Chimley, recalls that Mathu had once fought Fix, Beau’s father, the man all the characters fear will be leading a lynch mob after his son’s killer. When Fix once told Mathu to throw away his empty Coke bottle, “Mathu told him he wasn’t nobody’s servant” (30). In not allowing Fix to free-ride on the cooperative habits of his fellow plantation workers, Mathu was sending him the message that he could count on resistance from at least one of the black men. To send that message, Mathu had to be willing to fight, and he had to be willing to suffer the consequences of Fix’s wrath even if he won the fight. Sure enough, when Mathu won, “the white folks wanted to lynch Mathu” (30), and it was only because the sheriff took charge and forbade further reprisals that he escaped hanging. “But that wasn’t the last fight Mathu had on that river with them white people,” Chimley says. The other black men know that Mathu’s fighting back could potentially be to their benefit even more than his. And so when they hear about his latest act of altruistic punishment they’re inspired at last to join his efforts. “If he did it, you know we ought to be there” (30), Chimley’s fishing buddy Mat says to him. “Mathu was the only one we knowed had ever stood up” (31), and now they have a chance to stand up with him.

Part 3

They Comes a Day: Celebrating Cooperation in A Gathering of Old Men and Horton Hears a Who! Part 1

            Ernest Gaines opens his novel A Gathering of Old Men with a young boy named Snookum being sent on an errand to tell a group of men to come together in defense of an individual named Mathu, a black man who readers are led to believe has shot and killed a white man on a post-civil rights era Louisiana plantation still carrying on the legacy of Jim Crow. But the goal of protecting Mathu from revenge at the hands of the white man’s family gets subsumed by a greater cause, that of ensuring all the gathered men be treated as men and not like slaves. Though it may seem a flippant comparison, there are many parallels between Gaines’s novel and the children’s classic Horton Hears a Who! by Dr. Seuss, which likewise features a gathering of threatened people who can only save themselves by collectively calling for recognition of their personhood. Evolutionary critics, who see in narratives a play of evolved psychological mechanisms, would view this resemblance as more than coincidence.

            Brian Boyd examines Horton in his book On the Origin of Stories, juxtaposing it with Homer’s epic The Odyssey to demonstrate that both the children’s story and the ageless classic for adults engage emotional adaptations shared by all humans. Boyd’s theoretical framework incorporates a wide array of findings from both evolutionary and cognitive science. Though much of his thinking overlaps with the ideas William Flesch puts forth in Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, Flesch’s theory of narrative is at once more focused and multidimensional. Flesch theorizes that our thoughts and feelings are engaged while reading a story because we’ve evolved to monitor others—even fictional others—for signals of altruism and to emotionally favor those who emit them, while at the same time wanting to see those who behave selfishly get punished. He arrives at this social monitoring and volunteered affect model using research into the evolution of cooperation in humans, research which Boyd likewise refers to in explaining universal narrative themes. Though Flesch’s ideas are more compelling because he focuses more on the experience of reading stories than on their thematic content, both authors would agree that the appeal of stories like Horton and Gathering lies in our strong human desire to see people who are willing to cooperate, even at great cost to themselves, prevail over those who behave only on their own behalves.

            Though her research was published too late to be included in either Flesch’s or Boyd’s book, Karen Wynn, a Yale psychologist who studies the development of social behavior in children, has conducted experiments that highlight how integral the task of separating selfish actors from cooperators is even for children too young to speak. In one setup, infants watch a puppet show that features a small white tiger who wants to play ball and two rabbits, each of whom respond quite differently to the tiger’s overtures. One rabbit, distinguished by a green jacket, rudely steals off with the ball after the tiger has rolled it over. But when the other rabbit, this one in an orange jacket, receives the ball from the tiger, the two end up playfully rolling it back and forth to each other. The young children attend to these exchanges with rapt interest, and when presented with a choice afterward of which rabbit to play with they almost invariably choose the one with the orange jacket, the cooperative one. This preference extends even to wooden blocks with nothing but crude eyes to suggest they’re living beings. When Wynn’s colleagues stage a demonstration in which one block hinders another’s attempt to climb a hill, and then subsequently a third block helps the climber, children afterward overwhelmingly choose the helper to play with. Wynn concludes that “preverbal infants assess individuals on the basis of their behavior toward others” (557). Evolutionary game theorists, who use mathematical models to simulate encounters between individuals relying on varying strategies for dealing with others in an attempt to determine how likely each strategy is to evolve, call the behavior Wynn and her colleagues observed strong reciprocity, which Flesch explains occurs when “the strong reciprocator punishes or rewards others for their behavior toward any member of the social group, and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with the reciprocator” (22).

            Children reading Horton—or having it read to them—probably become engaged initially because they appreciate Horton’s efforts to protect the speck of dust on which he hears a voice calling for help. But that’s only the beginning of the elephant’s struggle to keep the microscopic creatures called the Whos safe. At one point, after chasing the eagle Vlad Vlad-i-koff, who has stolen a clover Horton has placed the Who’s speck of dust on, all through the night over absurdly rugged terrain, the elephant has to pick through a field with millions of nearly identical clovers before recovering the one with the Whos on it. The accompanying illustration of the slumped and bedraggled elephant shows beyond doubt the lengths to which Horton is willing to go on behalf of his friends. And, as Boyd points out, “we all love an altruist. As game theory simulations of cooperation show, any participant in a social exchange benefits when the other partner is an altruist. And Horton’s altruism is as colossal as his physique” (375). But Flesch would emphasize that we don’t favor Horton merely because he would be a good exchange partner for each of us to deal with directly; rather, we can signal our own altruism by volunteering affect on behalf of someone who has clearly demonstrated his own. He writes that

Among the kinds of behavior that we monitor through tracking or through report, and that we have a tendency to punish or reward, is the way others monitor behavior through tracking or through report, and the way they manifest a tendency to punish and reward (50).

So, even as we’re assessing someone to determine how selfish or altruistic he or she is, others are assessing us to see how we respond to what we discover. Favoring an altruist (or showing disfavor for a selfish actor) is itself a signal of altruism. In game theory terms, witnesses can become second-order altruists, or third-order, or however many order. But how could this propensity toward monitoring and cooperation have evolved in a Darwinian world of intense competition for survival and reproduction?

            The main conceptual tool used by game theorists to see how various strategies for dealing with others fare when pitted against each other is a scenario called The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Imagine two criminals are arrested and taken to separate rooms to be interrogated without being given a chance to consult with one another. If both criminals keep their mouths shut and confess to nothing, then they will both serve a prison sentence of one year. So their cooperation results in a negative outcome. However, if both criminals confess, the outcome is a longer, five-year sentence. What makes the scenario useful in understanding how cooperation could have evolved is the condition that if just one criminal confesses—if he or she takes advantage of the fellow prisoner’s cooperation—the confessor goes free without spending any more time in custody. Meanwhile, the criminal who doesn’t confess, but whose partner does, gets a sentence of twenty years. The idea is that small benefits accrue over time to cooperators, but there’s always temptation for individuals to act for their own short-term benefit to their partners’ detriment (Flesch 23; Boyd 56 uses slightly different numbers but to the same effect).

            The Prisoner’s Dilemma has several variations, and it can be scaled up to conceptualize cooperation among groups with more than two members. The single Who not shouting in Horton is an example of how even a lone free-rider, a “shirker,” can undermine group cohesion. And, mild as it is, this character gets some comeuppance when Seuss refers to him as a “twerp.” More severe punishment turns out to be unnecessary because the mayor of Who-ville prevails upon him how important his cooperation is. In Gathering, the men likewise face a prisoner’s dilemma when, having all brought their own shotguns and shown their own willingness to confess to the killing of the white man named Beau, Sheriff Mapes begins separating each of them in turn from the group gathered around Mathu’s porch and beating them when they refuse to name Mathu as the true culprit. Speaking to Mathu, Mapes says, “I know you did it… You’re the only one here man enough. But I have to hear it from one of them. One of them must say he was called here after it happened” (85). If just one man buckles under the sheriff’s abuse, analogous to the one year sentence for cooperators in The Prisoner’s Dilemma, then all their efforts will be for naught and the men will miss out on their opportunity to stand up to their white oppressors. The gathered men face another similar dilemma when the racist Luke Will shows up with his own group to lynch Mathu; as long as the older men cooperate, they maintain an advantage over the whites who can’t imagine them standing up at all, much less standing up together.

Part 2

Getting Gabriel Wrong: Part 3 of 3

Part 1.

Part 2.

From a SMVA perspective, then, readers seek out signals of Gabriel’s propensity for altruism and cooperation, and, once they receive them, are compelled to volunteer affect on his behalf. In other words, they are anxious for the plot to unfold in a way that favors and vindicates him. According to Flesch, this dynamic is the basis of “narrative interest,” which he defines as “anxiety on behalf of and about the motives, actions, and experiences of fictional characters” (7). Having detected Gabriel’s “difficult-to-fake” signal of his genuine concern for the caretaker’s daughter, readers can be counted on to sympathize with him. Immediately after he insists that Lily accept a coin and leaves her presence, he begins brooding over whether to include the lines from Browning in his speech. Here readers become privy to the tension underlying his self-consciousness: “he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers” (179). His thoughts continue:

their grade of culture differed from his. He would only make himself ridiculous by quoting poetry to them which they could not understand. They would think that he was airing his superior education. He would fail with them just as he had failed with the girl in the pantry (179).

Gabriel’s mother, through whom he is related to the hosts of the party, turns out to have “married T.J. Conroy of the Port and Docks” (179). In other words, “the brains carrier of the Morkan family” (186), as Aunt Kate calls Gabriel’s mother, married into money. Leonard contends that “the Browning quote is there to invite from [Gabriel’s] audience authorization for his viewing of himself as someone with refined tastes and a superior education” (460). But that Gabriel is more educated is not a boast he wants to convince everyone of; it is rather a fact he goes out of his way not to lord over them, as is the higher grade of culture his mother married into. Leonard also charges Gabriel with having “contempt for them as peers” (460), but if that were the case he would not bother himself about appearing “ridiculous” before them. The Lacanian is treating the reality Gabriel is trying to mitigate as a fantasy he is trying to propagate.

The predicament Gabriel faces that readers hope to see him through is that he really differs from the people at the party in important ways. His sense of not belonging is real, and yet he cares about them. To this day, anyone who has left a small town to go to college is faced with a similar dilemma whenever he or she returns home and realizes how vast the gulf is separating the educated from the uneducated. And, far from using his books as props for some delusion of grandeur, Gabriel genuinely loves them, so much so that when one arrives for him to review it is “almost more welcome than the paltry cheque” (188). It turns out that the Browning quote Leonard fails to credit him for not including in his speech came from one of these books he has reviewed. Gabriel originally applies the phrase “thought-tormented” to the “music” (192) of the Browning poem in his review. The phrase turns up again in his speech, but this time, in an act of creativity inspired by his confrontation with Miss Ivors, he has turned it into a charge against “a thought-tormented age… educated or hypereducated as it is,” which he also claims to fear is lacking in “humanity,” “hospitality,” and “kindly humour” (203)—this from the man who was mortified earlier lest the assembled audience “think that he was airing his superior education” (179). Rather than risk that verdict, Gabriel makes a complete concession to the sensibility of Miss Ivors, believing it to be more closely aligned with that of his audience than his own.

He is in this scene inhibiting his impulse to hold forth on the poetry he genuinely loves and the principles in which he genuinely believes because he recognizes that they will not only go unappreciated but will even be offensive to many in his audience. This is intelligence keeping passion in check, something Gabriel alone in the story is capable of. But this is also intelligence in the service of dishonesty; Gabriel is being disingenuous. His thoughts really are tormenting him throughout the story with greater self-consciousness. Lacanian critics may see this as a form of narcissism, but it is remarkable how reliably self-sacrificing Gabriel is. Indeed, the epiphany he experiences is that he is too self-sacrificing, a “pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians” (220). Hearing his wife Gretta tell the story of Michael Furey, the boy who braved the weather for her in a condition of ill-health and who died as a result, he recognizes a quality he himself lacks. What he finds so threatening and at the same time so admirable about Furey is his unchecked impulsivity, his passion untempered by intelligence. “Better pass boldly into that other world,” he thinks, “in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age” (223). Much like the eponymous Eveline in an earlier Dubliners story, Gabriel is at risk of being paralyzed by his duties to his family and to his culture.

That Gabriel is in a sense too altruistic does not imply that his epiphany is a repudiation of altruism; what Gabriel calls into question are the dishonesty his good nature leads him to and the provincialism that necessitates it. It is ironic that his realization is prompted by a former inhabitant of Galway, an Irish territory Miss Ivors had tried to persuade him to acquaint himself with earlier. But it must be noted that for Furey to be true to himself there meant he had to die. And yet there is a nostalgic note in the enigmatic line, written by an expatriate from Ireland now living on the continent: “The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward” (223). Gretta is of course also from Galway, and when Gabriel tells her of Miss Ivors suggestion she responds, “I’d love to see Galway again” (191). When Kelley argues that Gabriel’s vision of snow falling all over Ireland symbolizes how “Mutuality replaces mastery” (206) in his consciousness, he is only half-wrong. Gabriel has felt horribly alone all night. He has even felt alone throughout his marriage; when Gretta falls asleep after telling him the story of Michael Furey, “He watched her while she slept as though he and she had never lived together as man and wife” (222). But he has learned Gretta is just like him in that she keeps her true thoughts and feelings to herself: “He thought of how she who lay beside him had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes” (223). Mutuality is not replacing mastery; it is replacing isolation.

The central premise of Joyce’s story, that Gabriel needs to escape the close-minded nationalism of his Irish culture, or at least find a way to be true to himself within it, simply fails if Gabriel is not a character worth saving. Though Flesch insists one of his goals in Comeuppance “is to assert the reconcilability of a Darwinian perspective, one that accepts evolutionary origins and constraints on human mental processing, with the best of European philosophy, psychoanalysis, and literary theory” (207), it is difficult not to see the various Lacanian readings of “The Dead” as bestowing their views on the story rather than discovering them in it. In a bit of irony Lacan himself might have appreciated, it is the Lacanians who are the true narcissists, looking as they do into the story and seeing only their own principles reflected back at them. There is also an element of self-righteousness in their negative characterization of Gabriel, since naturally these critics are claiming to know better than to be so controlling and to put on such superior airs. But in imposing their self-consciously esoteric views they are doing a disservice to readers—and themselves—by making the story far less enjoyable.

Works Cited

Boyd, Brian. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge: Belknap,

2009. Print.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Anniversary Ed. Minneapolis: U of

Minnesota P, 2008. Print.

Flesch, William. Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological

Components of Fiction. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2007. Print.

Joyce, James. “The Dead.” Dubliners. Eds. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz. New York:

Penguin, 1996. 175-224. Print.

Kelley, James. “Mirrored Selves and Princely Failings: A Lacanian Approach to James Joyce’s

‘The Dead.’” In-Between: Essays & Studies in Literary Criticism 12.1-2 (2003):

201-09. Print.

Leonard, Gary. “Joyce and Lacan: ‘The Woman’ as a Symptom of ‘Masculinity’ in ‘The Dead.’”

James Joyce Quarterly 28.2 (1991): 451-72. Print.

Trujillo, Ivan E. “Perversion as the Jouissance of The Woman in ‘The Dead’: Joyce, Lacan and

Fucking the Other.” Other Voices 1.3 (1999): 1-11. Web. 30 Mar. 2010.

Wynn, Karen, J. Kiley Hamlin, and Paul Bloom. “Social Evaluation by Preverbal Infants.” Nature

450.22 (2007): 557-560. Web. 30 Mar. 2010.

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Getting Gabriel Wrong: Part 2 of 3

Part 1.

It may be argued, however, that Flesch’s is just another theory; that it calls for a reading of Joyce’s story that contradicts the way Lacanians read it hardly justifies dismissing one theory in favor of the other. The Marxist critic Terry Eagleton, in his Literary Theory: an Introduction, answers the protest that theories get in between readers and stories by arguing that “Hostility to theory usually means an opposition to other people’s theories and an oblivion of one’s own” (xii). Far from being oblivious to his own theory, though, Flesch marshals copious evidence to support the idea that people respond to characters in fiction the same way they do to people in real life, and that they therefore require no literary theory to appreciate literature. The evidence he cites comes mainly from experiments based on Game Theory scenarios designed to explore the circumstances under which people act either for their own selfish gain or for the mutual gain of groups to which they belong. But some experimenters have shown that even children too young to speak, certainly too young to be conversant in psychological or literary theories, tend to respond to the very type of signals to which Lacanian readers of “The Dead” are most oblivious.

Yale psychologist Karen Wynn published her research on children’s social cognition around the same time as Comeuppance was released, but even though Flesch’s book has no mention of Wynn’s findings they nonetheless demonstrate both how important the processes of social monitoring and volunteered affect are and how early they develop. Wynn’s team presented children as young as three months with a puppet show featuring a cat who wanted to play ball and two rabbits, one who rudely stole away with the ball when it was rolled to it and another who playfully rolled it back to the cat. The children watched the various exchanges with rapt attention, and when presented afterward with a choice of which rabbit to play with themselves almost invariably chose the more cooperative, demonstrating that “preverbal infants assess individuals on the basis of their behavior toward others” (557). This tendency emerges even when the show features no puppets, but only wooden blocks with crude eyes. Game Theorists call this behavior “strong reciprocity,” which Flesch explains “means the strong reciprocator punishes and rewards others for their behavior toward any member of the group, and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with the reciprocator” (22). So, the question regarding Gabriel Conroy becomes what aspects of his behavior signal to strongly reciprocal readers how prone to cooperation he is?

Joyce deliberately broadcasts a costly signal by exposing his protagonist’s private thoughts, risking the misunderstanding of readers unfamiliar with this style of close narration (and apparently that of Lacanians); he therefore strewed helpful signals throughout the story. In the sentence directly following the first mention of Gabriel—“it was long after ten o’clock and yet there was no sign of Gabriel and his wife”—a character named Freddy Malins is introduced. While the arrival of Gabriel and his wife is eagerly anticipated by his aunts and his cousin, “they were dreadfully afraid that Freddy Malins might turn up screwed” (176). Joyce may as well be Karen Wynn here, presenting one cooperator and one selfish actor to readers, who find out shortly thereafter that “Gabriel’s solicitude was a standing joke” (180) among his wife and his aunts. “It’s such a relief,” Aunt Kate says to Grabriel’s wife after he has gone to check on the state of Freddy, “that Gabriel is here” (182). Her relief can be compared not just to her feelings toward Freddy, but also toward another character, Mr. Browne, who she complains “is everywhere” in an aside to her niece. “He has been laid on here like the gas” (206). Gabriel himself neither participates in nor is in earshot of any of these character assessments. So readers can conclude that, the nature of his inner thoughts notwithstanding, he is thought highly of by his aunts.

There is one character, however, to whom Lacanians can point as having a less than favorable opinion of Gabriel. Molly Ivors, the second woman in the story to make Gabriel blush, provides a key to understanding the central tension of the plot. For Leonard, the story consists of “three attempts by Gabriel Conroy, with three different women, to confirm the fictional unity of his masculine subjectivity” (451). This is an arch and murky way of saying that Gabriel wants the women he encounters to think he is a good man so that he can believe it himself. It is therefore noteworthy to Leonard that Miss Ivors “did not wear a low-cut bodice” (187), which he insists “announces that Miss Ivors does not dress in accordance with what she imagines the male viewer wishes to see” (461). But how Joyce is really trying to characterize her can be seen in the second part of the sentence about what she is wearing: “and the large brooch which was fixed in front of her collar bore on it an Irish device” (187), which Leonard can only fumblingly dismiss as having “a signification for her that is not meant to signify anything to him” (461). But it clearly does signify something to him—that she is a nationalist. As does her dress. Décolletage is, after all, a French style.

What makes Gabriel blush is not Miss Ivors’s refusal to play to his conception of proper female behavior but her revealing to him her knowledge that he has been writing for a newspaper unsympathetic to her political leanings, as well as to the political leanings of the hosts and the guests at the party. Gabriel’s initial impulse in response and his reason for inhibiting it are telling:

He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years’ standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her (188).

That she is a peer Leonard chalks up as further upsetting feminine expectations, “a fact as awkward and threatening as the absence of a low-cut bodice” (462). The more significant detail here, though, is that even as she threatens to expose him as an outsider Gabriel is concerned not to offend her. And that he is capable of recognizing her as a peer belies the suggestion that all she is to him is a symptom of his insecure manhood. The blush in this scene signals Gabriel’s genuine anxiety lest his anti-nationalistic political orientation and his cosmopolitan tastes offend everyone at the party.

“The Dead” is replete with moments in which Gabriel inhibits his own plans and checks his own desires out of consideration for others. His thinking better of “a grandiose phrase” with Miss Ivors is one case in point, though she does manage to provoke him to reveal his true feelings (perhaps the only instance of him doing so in the whole story): “I’m sick of my own country, sick of it!” (189). Two other instances of him reconsidering his plans are when he performs his postprandial speech with nary a mention of Browning, some lines of whose non-Irish poetry he has been vacillating over quoting, and when he restrains himself from initiating a sexual encounter with his wife Gretta in their hotel room after the party because she is in a “strange mood” and “To take her as she was would be brutal” (217)—this despite the fact that he is in “a fever of rage and desire” (217). Kelley cites this line along with one that says, “He longed to be master of her strange mood,” and yet another that says, “He longed to cry to her from his soul, to crush her body against his, to overmaster her” (217), to support his claim that Gabriel has “infantile tendencies toward domination,” which manifest in his “narcissistic desire and aggression” (204). This could hardly be more wrong. If he were narcissistic, Gretta’s thoughts and feelings would go unregistered in his consciousness. If he were aggressive, he would treat her violently—he would certainly not be worried about being brutal just by coming on to her. The Lacanians are mistaking thoughts and impulses for actions when it is precisely the discrepancy between Gabriel’s desires and his behavior that proves his altruism.

Gabriel’s thoughtfulness is placed into stark relief by several other characters who show neither the inclination nor the capacity to filter their speech to protect other people’s feelings. Boyd explains: “The inhibition of automatic responses is essential to higher intelligence. It is also essential to morality, to overcoming instinctive but unwise responses to, for instance, anger” (264). The main function Gabriel’s blushing plays in the story is to let readers know something about his real feelings because they quickly discover that he is uniquely capable of acting against them. In this, he can be compared to Freddy Malins and Mr. Browne, who in one scene seem to be vying for the prize of who can be the most insulting to the singer Bartell D’Arcy. “Those were the days,” Browne says at one point, “when there was something like singing to be heard in Dublin” (199), presumably oblivious to or unconcerned with the fact that there is a singer among his interlocutors. Even Gabriel’s Aunt Kate joins the pile-on, asserting that “there was only one tenor. To please me, I mean” (199). Mr. D’Arcy, readers have been told and amply reminded, happens to be a tenor himself. And both Lily and Miss Ivors, based on their rudeness toward Gabriel, can be added to this list of those who fail to inhibit their automatic responses.

read part 3

Getting Gabriel Wrong: Part 1 of 3

Soon after arriving with his wife at his aunts’ annual celebration of Christmas, Gabriel Conroy, the protagonist of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” has an awkward encounter. Lily, “the caretaker’s daughter” (175), has gone with Gabriel into a pantry near the entrance to help him off with his coat. They exchange a few polite words before Gabriel broaches the topic of whether Lily might be engaged, eliciting from her a bitter remark about the nature of men, which in turn causes him to blush. After nervously adjusting his attire, Gabriel gives her a coin and rushes away to join the party. How readers interpret this initial scene, how they assess Gabriel’s handling of it, has much bearing on how they will experience the entire story. Many psychoanalytic critics, particularly followers of Jacques Lacan, read the encounter as evidence of Gabriel’s need to control others, especially women. According to this approach, the rest of the story consists of Gabriel’s further frustrations at the hands of women until he ultimately succumbs and adopts a more realistic understanding of himself. But the Lacanian reading is cast into severe doubt by an emerging field of narrative studies based on a more scientific view of human psychology. The theories put forth by these evolutionary critics, particularly the Social Monitoring and Volunteered Affect Theory formulated by William Flesch, highlight textual evidence that undermines readings by prominent Lacanians—evidence which has likely led generations of readers to a much more favorable view of Joyce’s protagonist.

At a glance, two disparate assessments of Gabriel seem equally plausible. Is he solicitous or overbearing? Fastidious or overweening? Self-conscious or narcissistic? While chatting with Lily, he smiles “at the three syllables she had given his surname” (177). He subsequently realizes that he “had known her when she was a child and used to sit on the lowest step nursing a rag doll” (177). Lacanian critic James Kelley asserts that these lines describe Gabriel “reveling in his position of superiority” (202). When Gabriel goes on to inquire about Lily’s schooling and, upon learning that she is no longer a student, whether he can expect to be attending her wedding sometime soon, she “glanced back at him over her shoulder and said with great bitterness: / —The men that is now is only all palaver and what they can get out of you” (177). Joyce leaves unanswered two questions in this scene: why does Lily respond “with great bitterness”? And why does Gabriel lose his composure over it? Kelley suggests that Lily is responding to Gabriel’s “attitude of superiority” (202). Gary Leonard, another Lacanian, sees the encounter similarly, charging Gabriel with the offense of “asking a real woman a question better asked of a little girl in a fairy tale (of course she is that unreal to him)” (458). But Leonard is holding Gabriel to a feminist standard that had not come into existence yet. And Gabriel’s smiling and reminiscing are just as likely reflective of a fatherly as they are of a patriarchal attitude.

One of the appeals of Flesch’s Social Monitoring and Volunteered Affect (SMVA) theory, which views the experience of fiction as a process of tracking characters for signals of altruism and favoring those who emit them, is that it relies on no notional story between the lines of the actual story. When encountering the scene in which Lily responds bitterly to Gabriel’s small talk, readers need not, for instance, be looking at a symbol of class conflict (Marxism) or gender oppression (Feminism) or one consciousness trying to wrest psychic unity from another (Lacanianism). Evidence can be culled from the scene to support the importance of these symbols and dynamics, along with countless others. But their importance rests solely in the mind of the critic serving as advocate for this or that theory. As Flesch’s fellow evolutionary critic Brian Boyd explains in his book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction, “Such critics assume that if they can ‘apply’ the theory, if they can read a work in its light, they thereby somehow ‘prove’ it, even if the criteria of application and evidence are loose” (387).Unfortunately, those trained in the application of one of these theories can become so preoccupied with the task of sifting between the lines that their experience—to say nothing of their enjoyment—of the lines themselves gets short shrift. And, as Boyd points out, “We learn more when evidence against a reading surfaces, since it forces us to account for a richer stock of information” (387, emphasis in original).

The distorting effect of theory can be seen in the Lacanian critics’ obliviousness toward several aspects of “The Dead” Joyce is trying to draw their attention to. Why, for instance, would Gabriel be embarrassed by Lily’s bitter response when there are no witnesses? She is just a lowly caretaker’s daughter; that he would be at all concerned with what she says or how she says it tells readers something about him. Joyce makes a point of suggesting that Gabriel’s blush is not borne of embarrassment, but rather of his shame at offending Lily, accidental though the offence may have been. He “coloured as if he felt he had made a mistake” (178), and that mistake was supposing Lily would be getting married soon. That Lily’s bitterness at this supposition has anything to do with Gabriel as opposed to the one or more men who have frustrated her in love is unlikely (unless she has a crush on him). Concerning her “three mistresses,” she knows, for instance, that “the only thing they would not stand was back answers” (176), implying that she has ventured some in the past and been chastised for them. Aunt Kate even complains later about Lily’s recent behavior: “I’m sure I don’t know what has come over her lately. She’s not the girl she was at all” (181). This may or may not be enough evidence to support the idea that Lily’s recent transformation resulted from a courtship with one of those men who is all palaver, but it certainly goes a long way toward undermining readings like Kelley’s and Leonard’s.

When Gabriel thrusts a coin into Lily’s hand, his purpose may be “to reestablish his superiority” (202), as Kelley argues, but that assumes both that he has a sense of his own superiority and that he is eager to maintain it. If Gabriel feels so superior, though, why would he respond charitably rather than getting angry? Why, when Aunt Kate references Lily’s recent change, does he make ready “to ask his aunt some questions on this point” (181) instead of making a complaint or insisting on a punishment? A simpler and much more obvious motivation for the thrusting of the coin is to make amends for the accidental offence. But, astonishingly, Leonard concludes solely from Joyce’s use of the word “thrusting” that Lily and Gabriel’s “social intercourse is terminated in a manner that mimics sexual intercourse” (458). Yet another Lacanian, Ivan Trujillo, takes this idea a step further: having equated Gabriel’s blush with an orgasm, he sees the coin as the culmination of an act of prostitution, as paying her back “for his orgasmic feeling of shame” (3).

From the perspective of SMVA theory, laid out in Flesch’s Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, Gabriel’s blushing, which recurs later in the story in his encounter with Molly Ivors, suggests something quite distantly removed from sexual arousal. “Blushing is an honest signal of how one feels,” Flesch writes. “It is honest because we would suppress it if we could” (103). But what feeling might Gabriel be signaling? Flesch offers a clue when he explains,

Being known through hard-to-fake or costly or honest signaling to have the emotional propensity to act against our own rational interests helps those who receive our signals to solve the problem of whether they can trust us. Blushing, weeping, flushing with rage, going livid with shock: all these are reliable signals, not only of how we feel in a certain situation but of the fact that we generally emit reliable signals. It pays to be fathomable. People tend to trust those who blush (106, emphasis in original).

The most obvious information readers of “The Dead” can glean from Gabriel’s blushing at Lily’s response to his questions is that he is genuinely concerned that he may have offended her. Lacanians might counter that his real concern is with the authentication of his own sense of superiority, but again if he really felt so superior why would he care about offending the lowly caretaker’s daughter in an exchange with no witnesses? In fact, Lily’s back is turned, so even she misses the blush. It can be read as a signal from Joyce to readers to let them know a little about what kind of character Gabriel is.

Part 2.

The Cost of Denying the Abyss: Signals of Selfishness and Altruism in Death in Venice 4th and Final Part

Read from the beginning

It is Tadzio’s role as a paragon of prosociality that makes his less than perfect teeth so striking to Aschenbach. When he first notices that the boys’ teeth are “not as attractive as they might have been,” he sees it as a sign that he is “sickly” and that he will “probably not live to grow old” (51). For some reason this thought provides him with a “feeling of satisfaction or relief,” perhaps because it allays some of the envy he feels for the boy, which is naturally already much allayed simply by dint of his being a child. Later, when Tadzio is playing on the beach with his friend Jashu, he is described as looking at the other boy and “smiling with eyes and lips” (60). And, when it happens by chance that Aschenbach and Tadzio actually come face-to-face and the young boy smiles at the old man, he can barely stand it. “You mustn’t smile like that!” he imagines saying. “One mustn’t, do you hear, mustn’t smile like that at anyone!” (67). The symbolism of teeth in Death in Venice is close to that of language: Aschenbach comes to know that “Eros dwells in language” (62) as he sits writing an essay that has been inspired by the boy’s beauty. Language itself is an inherently social adaptation. But the old writer uses it only in isolation. Likewise, teeth serve both the self-directed function of mastication and the other-directed one of conveying emotion.

Aschenbach at the beginning only sees virtue in the artist who “clenches his teeth in proud shame” (30) as he sacrifices himself, like St. Sebastian, to his art. But it was, in fact, the appearance of an exotic traveler’s teeth, bared aggressively, that brought about the “extraordinary expansion of his inner self” (25) that culminates in his trip to Venice. What he can’t stand about Tadzio’s smile is that it shows the happiness that comes with human interaction. Near the end of the novella, after he’s had his epiphanic vision of the bacchanal overtaking the mountains with “a human and animal swarm” (81), and after the narrator says that he “no longer feared the observant eyes of other people” (82), he is prepared to accept this message of the dual-purpose of teeth—and language—from the barber who is trying to convince him to dye his hair: “If certain people who profess moral disapproval of cosmetics were to be logical enough to extend such rigorous principles to their teeth, the result would be rather disgusting” (83).

But Tadzio serves as a major character in a novella that hews to an aesthetic of verisimilitude, so there must be more to him than what he symbolizes. What Mann suggests in the story is that Aschenbach is genuinely attracted to the boy for his classical beauty. From this initial admiration, his obsession could simply have developed as a result of his hitherto un-volunteered emotions finding a convenient object. From this perspective, the absence of Tadzio’s father is significant because it means there is less threat of violent reprisal for his stalking of the boy. Aschenbach is a social cripple. While he is simply incapable of meaningfully conversing and interacting with adults, he is morally and artistically bound not to get too close to the young boy. At one of the few points where he considers taking the plunge, he balks because he fears it would lead “to a wholesome disenchantment,” and “the fact now seemed to be that the aging lover no longer wished to be disenchanted, that the intoxication was too precious to him” (63). His solitary existence has been suffocating him so long that he’s glad for even this unfulfilling and forbidden interaction at a distance.

And the two do indeed interact. It seems the influence between them isn’t just in the direction of sociable boy to aloof man either; it goes the other way as well. When the street band plays outside the hotel, Aschenbach is horrified by the guitarist’s violation of “artistic distance” (76) as he works the crowd, a social artist without the slightest concern for dignity. While the rest of the crowd laughs, Aschenbach remains serious, and to his surprise he sees Tadzio, sitting on a balcony across from him, is “returning his glance,” and

had remained no less serious than himself, just as if he were regulating his attitude and expression by those of the older man, and as if the general mood had no power over him while Aschenbach kept aloof from it (76).

A few days later, on what will be his last day on the beach, Aschenbach witnesses a fight between Tadzio and his subservient friend Jashu. The weaker but higher-status boy throws sand in the face of the stronger, submissive one. Jashu wrestles Tadzio to the ground and presses his face into the sand until he is nearly suffocated. After the tussle, Tadzio sulks away, waving off all gestures of remorse and refusing all pleas for forgiveness. The last thing Aschenbach sees before his death is the boy he loved for his social nature standing alone on a small island with his back to his friends. As he loses consciousness, he imagines the young boy summoning him, not to himself but out toward the sea, the abyss, beyond.

Aschenbach ultimately fails to save Tadzio by informing his mother of the epidemic because he lacks the strength to redeem himself. The idea of returning to the sterility of his disciplined solitude appeals to him no more than resigning himself to death from cholera. Even though he considers telling Tadzio’s mother to leave Venice with her family, “a decent action which would cleanse his conscience,” and which would also signal his altruism, he never goes through with it because it would “give him back to himself again” (80). He thus becomes a second-order free-rider by failing to punish the Venetian authorities who are covering up the crisis to protect their income from tourists. But he will get what’s coming to him. He will pay the price for his fame and for the mistake embodied in the art that purchased it for him; he pays for trying to deny his affinity with the abyss—and in doing so he signals his creator’s acknowledgement of it.

Of the considerations which recommend Flesch’s theory about our emotional engagement with literature, perhaps the most compelling is that if it is valid it would lead to the inevitable conclusion that we in fact don’t need a theory, either Flesch’s or anyone else’s, to enjoy narratives. (A theory that argues for its own superfluity—how’s that for costly signaling?) And it is difficult to imagine someone reading Death in Venice for the first time and not vacillating between pity and disgust at each new development of Aschenbach’s predicament, not wondering what Thomas Mann meant in having his character go on at such overblown length about the nature of art, not shuffling among multiple hypotheses about Mann’s feelings toward Aschenbach, and not dreading the possibility that Tadzio might be harmed in some way, his innocence compromised, dreading it almost as much for the sake of Aschenbach as for the boy himself because it would be so catastrophic for both of them. It is difficult to imagine anyone laying the book down and then having a casual conversation about it that didn’t focus on these concerns.

But, if the theory does have validity, it would not suggest that all works ought to be equally accessible to all readers, and part of the appeal of Death in Venice is that it is multifaceted enough to prompt innumerable conversations, casual and otherwise, assuming those reading it have the wherewithal to appreciate its niceties. After all, our ability to appreciate the most sophisticated texts is a form of honest signaling onto itself. In addition to sophistication, Mann’s novella also provides us an opportunity to signal our own strong reciprocity by caring what type of character Achenbach turns out to be—and what type of author Thomas Mann was. In the end, though, the characters in any given story need not lend themselves to easy analysis in terms of strong reciprocity; many of the most fascinating characters, from Milton’s Satan, to Bronte’s Heathcliff, even to the pirate Jack Sparrow, demonstrate dynamic mixes of selfish and altruistic behavior. But what will they do when it really matters?

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THE ADAPTIVE APPEAL OF BAD BOYS

An Evolutionary Approach to Death in Venice Part 3

Read from the beginning

Flesch follows theorists Amotz and Avishag Zahavi in positing what they call “the handicap principle” as an explanation for how strong reciprocity could evolve and persist in animal populations. As is evident from people’s behavior in The Ultimatum Game, they are willing to pay a price, in other words to handicap themselves, for the sake of fairness. What makes the handicap effective as a signal is that the individual who imposes it on him- or herself must be able to survive with the added burden. The peacock signals his fitness with his elaborate feathers because only a fit individual could drag around such a cumbersome display. (Conspicuous consumption is the human financial analog.) Humans, on the other hand, signal their fitness, and thus enhance their reputations, by taking on the costs of rewarding fellow altruists, and even more so by punishing defectors. Flesch calls this “costly signaling.” And it explains the emphasis Mann places on the costs incurred by Aschenbach in the service of his art. But does Aschenbach’s writing somehow signal his strong reciprocity?

Death in Venice is at base a narrative exploration of the nature of art and how it affects the life of the artist. It must be borne in mind that even as we are assessing Aschenbach’s work for signs of strong reciprocity we are simultaneously assessing the work of Thomas Mann for the same quality. This observation suggests the possibility that, altruistic as Aschenbach may have believed he was in the beginning of the story, Mann may be signaling to us, his readers, his own altruism by punishing his character for his wrongheaded approach to art. In Flesch’s words, “The story tells a story of punishment; the story punishes as story; the storyteller represents him- or herself as an altruistic punisher by telling it” (83). We in turn signal our own strong reciprocity by volunteering affect for the characters, in the case of Aschenbach a feeling of suspicion and indignation at the beginning—assuming we disagree with his theories of art—and perhaps even a pleasurable anticipation of comeuppance for him. By the end of the story, though, what we feel for him is more likely to be pity. Aschenbach won much of his acclaim as the author of a work called A Study in Abjection, which reflects his decision to “repudiate knowledge” (32). The story is described as

an outbreak of disgust against an age indecently undermined by psychology and represented by the figure of that spiritless, witless semiscoundrel who cheats his way into a destiny of sorts when, motivated by his own ineptitude and depravity and ethical whimsicality, he drives his wife into the arms of a callow youth—convinced that his intellectual depths entitle him to behave
with contemptible baseness (32).

It seems the story was about a second-order free-rider who failed or refused to punish two defectors. And the story itself was the punishment of the second-order free-rider by a third-order observer. So, Aschenbach is indeed a moralist, a strong reciprocator, by he is a moralist of a certain type:

The forthright words of condemnation which here weighed vileness in the balance and found it wanting—they proclaimed their writer’s renunciation of all moral skepticism, of every kind of sympathy with the abyss; they declared his repudiation of the laxity of that compassionate principle which holds that to understand all is to forgive all (32).

The principle Aschenbach adheres to in the place of understanding and forgiveness is Frederick the Great’s “durchhalten!” (29), which signals his determination to rise above his own disadvantages, to trumpet “the heroism of weakness” (31). This Anti-Enlightenment attitude is all but indistinguishable from conservative ideology at the beginning of the Twenty-First Century. And it may even be that with the novella Mann is signaling not just his strong reciprocity and his aesthetic philosophy, but also his political beliefs.

The closing section of the novella can be seen as a refutation of the theory of art expounded in the second chapter. Aschenbach, it seems, has overcompensated for the undignified, unmanly nature of his work by applying to it a militaristically strenuous ethos. Over time, this intense rigor has dried his well of creativity, and his existence has become unbearably sterile. The turn he takes over the course of the plot is toward greater fertility. Unfortunately, he lacks the wisdom to balance his unruly social emotions with his eagerness to maintain his dignity.

There he sat, the master, the artist who had achieved dignity, the author of A Study in Abjection, he who in such paradigmatically pure form had repudiated intellectual vagrancy and the murky depths, who had proclaimed his renunciation of all sympathy with the abyss, who had weighed vileness in the balance and found it wanting; he who had risen so high, who had set his face against his own sophistication, grown out of all his irony, and taken on the commitments of one whom the public trusted; he, whose fame was official, whose name had been ennobled, and on whose style young boys were taught to model their own (85).

Some critics cite these lines as evidence that the narrator is taking a step away from the character and establishing an ironic distance (Furst 167). According to this reading, Mann has witnessed his protagonist’s dejection in the face of overwhelming temptation, and is taking an opportunity to signal to his readers that he doesn’t condone this acquiescence but is merely narrating it. But the statement that Aschenbach had successfully “grown out of all his irony” in the midst of such an ironic sentence belies that reading. And that he goes on to deliver, in his imagination at least, a discourse on what he’s discovered through the course of his journey to be the true nature of art further suggests the inextricability of the narration from Aschenbach’s thoughts.

In the lines about the former dignified master, Mann is maintaining the free indirect style of narration he’s used throughout the story. The early respect and admiration evinced by the narrator is a reflection of Aschenbach’s high opinion of himself, and when this opinion turns sour it isn’t a signal that the narrator is abandoning him, but that he simply has come to think ill of himself. (A comparison of the narrative style of Death in Venice with that of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary may be of future interest.) In an earlier scene, Mann even locates the source of Aschenbach’s self-doubts. The love-stricken man is standing in the hallway of the hotel, leaning his head against the door to listen for Tadzio’s voice, and running “the risk of being surprised and discovered in this insane situation” (71). This risk calls to mind his ancestors, to whom he habitually rehearses the list of his achievements so that he can assure himself of “the respect they could not have withheld.” But naturally he’s worried about what they might say about his present circumstances.

But for that matter, what would they have said about his entire life, a life that had deviated from theirs to the point of degeneracy, this life of his in the compulsive service of art, this life about
which he himself, adopting the civic values of his forefathers, had once let fall such mocking observations (71).

Aschenbach’s militaristic approach to his writing has been a reaction to his abiding uncertainty about the value, the manly dignity, of any life devoted to art. He wants to prove to himself that he is living up to the standards and ideals of his heroic ancestors. And yet, here he is, shamefully infatuated with a young boy he lacks the social grace even to greet casually. We may feel pity for him at this point, but to do so, ironically, we must apply that same principle, “to understand all is to forgive all” (32), he himself has so strenuously repudiated. This is his comeuppance.

In his discourse to Phaedrus near the end of the novella, Aschenbach has to admit to the young boy, and to himself, that “though we may be heroes in our fashion and disciplined warriors, yet we are like women, for it is passion that exalts us,” and that “we writers can be neither wise nor dignified” (85). And, despite his earlier renunciation, he now recognizes that he “has been born with an incorrigible and natural tendency toward the abyss” (86). The great author’s downfall can be read as the inevitable result of his long repression of this tendency. But it can also be read as a demonstration of the real dangers all artists must face, the costs that will ensue should they fail to strike a proper balance between disciplined solitude and passionate abandon. As the story begins, Aschenbach’s work is described as tending “toward the exemplary and definitive, the fastidiously conventional, the conservative and formal and even formulaic” (33). This description is remarkable for its distance from the work in which it is found, and thus it fails to imply the approval the author—here at the beginning of the story is where the narrator’s ironic distance is most in evidence. And since the distance between Aschenbach and Thomas Mann is established early on, the two men’s views of art can actually be seen as converging at the end of the novella, though Mann probably intended to imply that Aschenbach is overcompensating in the opposite direction in his move toward acknowledging his kinship with the abyss.

But is Aschenbach’s attraction to Tadzio merely a punishment exacted by an unsympathetic contriver of the plot that is his fate? When he first glimpses the young boy, it is in the presence of several of his sisters, a governess, and later his mother. This absence of an adult male figure may be noteworthy in light of the narrator’s earlier emphasis on the fact that Aschenbach, though once married and father to a girl, “never had a son” (33). As noted earlier, his feelings for the boy are at one point described as “a paternal fondness” (51). In many ways, Tadzio is nothing like the old man: he has long, blond, curly hair, compared with Aschenbach’s short, dark hair; he gives off an “air of richness and indulgence” (44), while Achenbach is all austerity and restraint; he is a “lie-abed” (46) while the old man gets up early to work; most importantly, Tadzio is always surrounded with companions, while Aschenbach had “grown up by himself, without companions,” and because of his physical weakness “medical advice and care made school attendance impossible” (29). Tellingly, after first seeing Tadzio and watching him on the beach that first time, he goes back to his hotel room, where

he spent some time in front of the looking glass studying his gray hair, his weary sharp-featured face. At that moment he thought of his fame, reflected that many people recognized him on the streets and would gaze at him respectfully, saluting the unerring and graceful power of his language—he recalled the external successes he could think of that his talent had brought him, even calling to mind his elevation to nobility (51).

What Aschenbach has just become aware of through comparing himself to the boy is that Tadzio is prosocial—he even volunteers some punitive affect, a mild altruistic punishment on behalf of his Polish countrymen, to a Russian family sharing the beach when he signals them by “glaring forth a black message of hatred” (49)—while he, despite his fame, is utterly friendless and his days are devoted solely to his own selfish endeavors. In many ways, Tadzio is his conduit from his northern, solitary, disciplined, and even antiseptic existence to the southern world that is crowded, indulgent, and, it turns out, infected. When he acknowledges his love for the boy is when his famously closed fist opens in “a gesture that gladly bade welcome” (57).

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Literary Darwinism and Death in Venice Part 2

Part 1.

At one point, Tadzio smiles at Aschenbach, and the famous author is “so deeply shaken that he was forced to flee” (67). The poor man nearly collapses hyperventilating.

Whether the character is wrestling with a temptation to molest the boy or not, however, it may seem as though Mann has gone far afield of the domain accessible to evolutionary biology, especially in light of the Achenbach’s ultimate fate in the story. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson map this domain in their introduction to the essay collection The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. The authors whose work they’ve included in the book focus on three main questions: “First, what is literature about?” (xxv), in other words, what can an evolutionary approach tell us about the contents of literary work? Gottschall and Wilson preview the answer, suggesting that “survival and reproduction are ‘on the minds’ of all species that have minds and should dominate the stories of the one speaks and writes.” Joseph Carroll’s contribution to the collection, “Human Nature and Literary Meaning,” exemplifies this approach. Carroll goes so far as to schematize seven of what he terms “behavioral systems” into a diagram of human interests we can expect to find in successful stories (89).

The elements of Death in Venice critics like Carroll would probably emphasize are Aschenbach’s concern for his status, his awareness of his parents’ legacy, and his own “paternal fondness” (51) for Tadzio. However, Tadzio is not in fact Aschenbach’s son, meaning the older man has no genetic interest in the boy. And, though “Mating” is on Carroll’s diagram, pederasty really doesn’t have any place on it. A case could be made that Tadzio somehow hijacks Aschenbach’s parenting system, and that his mating system, though misdirected, is still functioning. But the explanatory power of the model is further diminished by each of these exceptions—as well as the one represented by the “Survival” system. And the second question addressed by the authors of Literary Animal, “what is literary for?” (xxv), the question of function, poses its own problems for readings of Mann’s novella. In her essay, “Reverse-Engineering Narrative,” Michelle Scalise Sugiyama argues that our proclivity to tell and attend to stories evolved as “a low-cost, readily available means of amplifying social experiences” (189). This didactic function may also overlap with one akin to play or exercise, leading to “a feedback loop between storytelling and theory of mind: storytelling may help build or strengthen theory of mind, which in turn enriches storytelling, with further enriches theory of mind, and so on” (189). As intriguing as this idea is, it can only account for stories about people in general, and say much about why any specific story is more compelling than any other. The third question posed in The Literary Animal is what would an application of a scientific epistemology to literature look like? But to my knowledge no research that even approaches the rigor of science has been conducted on Death in Venice.

William Flesch makes a significant advance for evolutionary theories of literature by not focusing on either content or function; instead his interest lies in what he calls “narrative interest,” which he defines as “anxiety on behalf of and about the motives, actions, and experiences of fictional characters” (7). In concentrating on why we experience anxiety and other emotions—what he calls “volunteered affect”—Flesch is moving into the realm of phenomenology (but he fortunately steers clear of the absurd obscurantism of past theorists in that realm). Merely by attempting to explain this experience of what he, along with several of the authors in The Literary Animal, recognizes as a “cultural universal,” he is effectively countering Eagleton’s argument about the necessity of theory. Indeed, Donald Brown reports in his book Human Universals, everywhere we know there are people, we have good evidence that they routinely immerse themselves in stories, even if many of them take much more rudimentary forms than the most sophisticated world literature. There are several other research programs that have demonstrated the immediacy of our experience with narratives. One study that was conducted after Flesch’s book was published found that “Different neural systems track changes in the situation of a story” (Speer et al. 989). The interesting thing about these different neural systems is that they aren’t all associated with language. “Some of these regions mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities” (989). What this study and others like it suggest is that, contra Poststructuralism, we take meaning from language by referencing it against our experiences—experience and meaning may be inseparable, but experience takes precedence.

But why should our brains be so engaged with the activities of fictional characters? Why, for that matter, should so much of our minds be devoted to following what even real people do? Flesch takes another important step toward a viable theory of narrative engagement when he eschews what is known as “The Selfish Gene” approach to ethology, named for the 1976 book by Richard Dawkins. According to this view, all behavior is the end result of a chain of causation ending with the genotype of the individual performing the behavior. The corollary to this assumption is that all behavior must somehow serve the genes that are its ultimate cause. So, for instance, any behavior which appears to benefit another individual can usually be shown to favor the genes of the one performing it. The two main examples or this genetic selfishness resulting in apparent altruism are inclusive fitness, whereby individuals favor relatives because they are likely to carry many of the same genes, including the ones causing the behavior, and reciprocal altruism, whereby individuals engage in tit-for-tat or quid pro quo exchanges with non-related others. Recent theorists, however, most notably Elliot Sober, David Sloan Wilson (the co-editor of The Literary Animal), and Robert Axelrod, have developed models in which cooperation rather than selfishness, genetic or otherwise, is the norm. And these models have held up against, partly because they were informed by, tests of real human behavior.

The problem with cooperation within a group is that as soon as it is established individuals can benefit themselves (and their genes) by treating the cooperators selfishly—i.e. by cheating. From the selfish gene perspective, selection at the level of the group is all but impossible because “group boundaries,” in Flesch’s words, “are too porous” (5). Any population in which acting for the benefit of the group is the norm will almost certainly be infiltrated by individuals acting for their own benefit. To conceptualize and test the various models of cooperation, many biologists use a scenario borrowed from the economic field of “Game Theory” known as “The Prisoner’s Dilemma.” The prisoner is arrested with one of his accomplices, from whom he is immediately separated so that they have no chance to communicate. Each prisoner then has the option either to confess or to keep quiet. If neither prisoner confesses—i.e. if they cooperate—they will each serve a meager one-year sentence. But if the first prisoner keeps quiet while the second confesses, then the first gets twenty years and the second goes free. This scenario simulates the conditions under which small benefits accrue to cooperators, but there is much more to be gained by cheating. If they both confess, they each get five years. Cooperation can still take hold over multiple iterations if the prisoners simply remember how their accomplices responded to the dilemma in the past. Reciprocal altruism is what develops in the scenarios when reputations for cooperating or cheating come into play. But something still more interesting happens when you put humans, who can be counted on to have not only reputations but also myriad social ties, through scenarios like the Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Flesch finds an important clue to the mystery of human engagement with fictional narrative in the outcomes of experiments based on a variation of the Prisoner’s Dilemma called “The Ultimatum Game.” In this simple set-up, one participant is given a sum of money which he must then propose to split with another participant with the only proviso being that the receiver must accept the cut being offered. If the receiver thinks the cut is unfair, say if the proposer offers a measly ten percent, he or she can veto the offer and neither participant gets any money. The key here, as Flesch points out, is that

It is irrational for the responder not to accept any proposed split from the proposer. The responder will always come out better by accepting than by vetoing. And yet people generally veto offers of less than 25 percent of the original sum. This means they are paying to punish (31).

People experience this costly indignation even when they aren’t themselves the potential beneficiaries of the proposed cut. In another variation of the game called the “3-Player Dictator Game,” the first player, the dictator, receives the sum of cash and then offers the second player a cut, this time without any threat of veto. The catch is that the third player can reward or punish the other two, but to do so he or she has pay. For every dollar the third player contributes, he or she can add four dollars to the receiver or deduct four dollars from the dictator. “It is highly irrational,” Flesch observes, “for this player to pay to reward or punish, but again considerations of fairness trump rational self-interest. People do pay” (33). And it seems they actually enjoy paying. Flesch goes on to cite research showing that pleasure centers in the brain become active when people are witnessing these types of interaction and anticipating this type of punishment, which because of its cost to the punisher is called “altruistic punishment.” It has a real-world corollary in the Italian Mafia’s strictly enforced code of silence known as “omerta,” under which anyone who informs against his colleagues can expect to be killed.

Groups in which the type of behavior demonstrated by third players in dictator games, known as “strong reciprocity,” which Flesch defines as occurring when a group member “punishes and rewards others for their behavior toward any member of the social group, and not just or primarily for their individual interactions with reciprocator” (21-22), can sustain a norm of cooperation. On a basic level, a taxonomy can be created of different types of individual within a cooperative population: there are the cooperators, the defectors, who act solely for their own (or their genes’) interest, and punishers. Adding strong reciprocity to the equation, though, gives us what are called “second-order” players. If, for instance, an individual defects, or free-rides on the cooperation of the other group members, anyone who witnesses this behavior and fails to punish it becomes a second-order free-rider. By extrapolation, someone who fails to punish a second-order free-rider becomes a third-order one, and so on ad infinitum. So we now have a model in which individuals track each other’s behavior to see whether they are altruistic or selfish, and in which individuals are emotionally inclined to favor the altruistic and desire punishment, from first or second or however many order punishers, for the selfish, but there is one more piece of the puzzle of human cooperation, one which is integral to an evolutionary account of our interest in a character like Gustav von Aschenbach.

Death in Venice is the story of a man who has devoted himself so completely to his writing that any part of him concerned with all the other aspects of his life, and in particular his social life, has atrophied to the point of paralysis. His writing has been his grand, altruistic gesture to society, a gesture made at a great personal cost.

Hidden away among Aschenbach’s writings was a passage directly asserting that nearly all the great things that exist owe their existence to a defiant despite: it is despite grief and anguish, despite poverty, loneliness, bodily weakness, vice and passion and a thousand inhibitions, that they have come into being at all. But this was more than an observation, it was an experience, it was positively the formula of his life and his fame (30).

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A Literary Darwinist Take on Death in Venice Part 1

There is comfort to be had in the orderliness of solitude, but that orderliness will be the first casualty in any encounter with other people. Such is the experience of Gustav von Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s 1911 novel Death in Venice. Aschenbach has not, however, strived for solitude and order for the sake of comfort—at least not by his own account—but rather for the sake of his art, to which he has devoted himself single-mindedly, even monomaniacally, his whole life. Now, at age fifty, newly elevated to a titled status, Aschenbach has become acutely aware of all he has sacrificed on the altar of his accomplishment. The desire for fame, as philosopher David Hume explained, is paradoxically an altruistic one. At least in the short-term, no one has anything to gain from the dedication and toil that are the hallmark of ambition. And status will tend to be awarded to those whose services or accomplishments benefit society at large and not any select part of it the ambitious has special designs for or interest in. As selfish as we may seem at first glance, we humans tend to be drawn to the ambitious for the other-directedness their ambition signals.

Evolutionary Literary Critic William Flesch incorporates Hume’s argument into the theoretical framework he lays out in Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction, in which he posits that one of our biggest joys in reading fictional narratives derives from our capacity to track characters while anticipating rewards for the altruistic and comeuppance for the selfish. With this biological perspective in mind, Aschenbach’s fate in the course of the novel can be viewed as hinging on whether he will be able, once he’s stepped away from the lonely duty of his writing, to establish intimate relationships with real humans, as he betrays a desperate longing to do. When he ultimately fails in this endeavor, largely because he fails to commit himself to it fully, Mann has the opportunity to signal to his readers how grave the danger is that every artist, including Thomas Mann, must face as he stands at the edge of the abyss.

Mann’s novel was published at an interesting time, not just geopolitically, but in the realm of literary theory as well. Most notably, the years leading up to 1911 saw the ascendancy of Freudian psychoanalysis. Mann has even suggested that Death in Venice was at least partly inspired by Freud’s ideas (Symington, 128). And it has gone on to be re-evaluated countless times in light of not only psychoanalytic developments but of those of several other newly christened and burgeoning literary theories. Readers of this nearly hundred-year-old story may rightly ask whether it has any meaning to anyone not steeped in such paradigms, especially since the value—and validity—of literary theory in general, and psychoanalysis in particular are being questioned in many arenas. Terry Eagleton notes in the preface to the 25th Anniversary Edition of his popular Literary Theory: An Introductionthat there has been “in recent times the growth of a kind of anti-theory” (vii). In the original preface to the same work, he writes:

Some students and critics…protest that literary theory “gets in between the reader and the work.” The simple response to this is that without some kind of theory, however unreflective and implicit, we would not know what a “literary work” was in the first place, or how we were to read it (xii).

Authors like Flesch, however, along with others who subscribe to the recently developed set of theories collectively labeled Literary Darwinism, would probably insist that Eagleton vastly underestimates just how unreflective and implicit our appreciation of narrative really is.

If there are cases, though, in which Eagleton’s argument holds up, they would probably be those works which are heavily influenced by the theories that would be referenced to interpret them, and Death in Venice certainly falls into that category. But these special cases shouldn’t overshadow the fact that when Eagleton makes the seemingly obvious point that we must have some theory of literature if we’re to make any sense of our reading, he is in fact making a rather grand assumption, one in keeping with a broader poststructuralist paradigm. According to this view, objectivity is impossible because our only real contact with the world and its inhabitants is through language. This observation, which in a banal way is indisputable—if it’s not rendered linguistically we can’t speak or write about it—takes the emphasis away from any firsthand experience with either the world or the text and affords to language the utmost power in determining our beliefs, and even our perceptions. The flipside of this linguistic or discursive determinism is that any social phenomenon we examine, from a work of fiction to the institutionalized marginalization of women and minorities, is somehow encapsulated in and promulgated through the medium of language. Poststructuralism has led many to the conclusion that the most effective remedy for such inequality and injustice consists of changing the way we talk and write about people and their relations. This political program, disparaged (accurately) by conservatives with the label “political correctness,” has been singularly ineffective.

One possible explanation for this failure is that the poststructuralists’ understanding of human nature and human knowledge is grossly off the mark. Indeed, to Eagleton’s claim that we need a theory of literature or of language to get meaning out of a novel, most linguists, cognitive neuroscientists, and any other scientist involved in the study of human behavior would simply respond nonsense. Almost all of the “structures” discursive determinists insist are encapsulated in and propagated through language are to be found elsewhere in human (and sometimes non-human) cognition and in wider cultural networks. It is perhaps a partial concession to the argument that discursive determinism can only lead to infinite regresses, and that any theory of literature must be grounded in a wider understanding of human nature, that the longest chapter of Eagleton’s book is devoted to psychoanalysis. And what could Death in Venice be if not a tale about a repressed homosexual who has achieved eminence through the disciplined sublimation of his desires into literature, but who eventually buckles under the strain and succumbs to perversion and sickness? More importantly, if Freud’s model of the unconscious has been shown to be inaccurate, and repression a mere chimera, must Mann’s novel be relegated to a category of works whose interest is solely historical? (One of the most damning refutations of Eagleton’s argument for the necessity of theory is that such a category is so difficult to fill.)

If Flesch is correct in arguing that our interest in fiction is inseparable from our propensity for tracking other people, assessing their proclivity toward altruism, and anticipating the apportionment of just deserts, Gustav von Aschenbach, who has devoted his life to solitary public service, but who through the course of the novel abandons this service and sets out on an adventure consisting of multiple potential encounters with flesh-and-blood humans, may still attract the attention of post-Freudian (or simply non-Freudian) readers. Another way to frame to the repression-sublimation-perversion dynamic central to Death in Venice is as an enactment of the benefits of an intense devotion to art being overwhelmed by its costs and risks. An excerpt that can serve as a key to unlocking the symbolism of the entire novel comes when Aschenbach is at last settled in his hotel in Venice:

The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions. The fruit of solitude is originality, something daringly and disconcertingly beautiful, the poetic creation. But the fruit of solitude can also be the perverse, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden (43).

Can Aschenbach, a devotee of solitude, be considered prosocial or altruistic? He can when the fruit of his solitude is the poetic creation prized by the society as a whole. However, the plot of the story focuses more on the perverse and the forbidden, on the great man’s fall from grace. Any yet these costs are suffered, not by society, but by the artist alone, so in the end he can be seen as even more of an altruist—he is in fact a martyr. (And many a poststructuralist critic would take this opportunity to highlight the word art in the middle of martyr.)

In the lead-up to this martyrdom, however, Aschenbach toes the very selfish waters of pedophilia. What little suspense the plot has to offer comes from uncertainty over how far the august author will allow his obsession with the young boy Tadzio to take him. Are we monitoring Aschenbach to see if he gives into temptation? Interestingly, his attraction for the young boy is never explicitly described as sexual. There are suggestive lines, to be sure, especially those coming in the wake of Aschenbach’s discovery of the epidemic being covered up by the Venetian authorities. His response is to become elated.

For to passion, as to crime, the assured everyday order and stability of things is not opportune, and any weakening of the civil structure, any chaos and disaster afflicting the world, must be welcome to it, as offering a vague hope of turning such circumstances to its advantage (68).

This line can not only be read as proof that Aschenbach indeed has a selfish desire to satisfy, a passion awaiting the opportunity to press—or take—its advantage; it can also be seen as a piece of puzzle that was his motivation for coming to Venice in the first place. Did he gravitate to this place because of the disruption of the daily order, the chaos, it promised? Soon after the narrator refers to this “vague hope” he reveals that Aschenbach has begun doing more than merely watching Tadzio—he’s been following him around. All the while, though, the unease about whether the devotee of solitude will ever get close enough to do any sort of harm to the object of his obsession is undercut by the great pains he goes to just to keep the boy in view juxtaposed with the fact that it never seems to occur to him to simply approach and begin a conversation.

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